History > 2006 > USA > Education (I)

Devars Dean, left, and Inerik Salas, seventh graders

at Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High in Sacramento, Calif.,

where intensive reading and math classes have raised test scores.

Max Whittaker for The New York Times        March 26, 2006

Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math        NYT        26.3.2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/education/26child.html

Can't Complete High School?

Go Right Along to College

May 30, 2006
The New York Times
By KAREN W. ARENSON

It is a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland idea. If you do not finish high school, head straight for college.

But many colleges — public and private, two-year and four-year — will accept students who have not graduated from high school or earned equivalency degrees.

And in an era of stubbornly elevated high school dropout rates, the chance to enter college through the back door is attracting growing interest among students without high school diplomas.

That growth is fueling a debate over whether the students should be in college at all and whether state financial aid should pay their way. In New York, the issue flared in a budget battle this spring.

They are students like April Pointer, 23, of New City, N.Y., a part-time telemarketer who majors in psychology at Rockland Community College, whose main campus is in Suffern, N.Y. Ms. Pointer failed science her senior year of high school and did not finish summer school.

But to her father's amazement, last year she was accepted at Rockland, part of the State University of New York.

"He asked, 'Don't you have to have a high school diploma to go to college?' " she said. "I was like, 'No, not anymore.' "

There are nearly 400,000 students like Ms. Pointer nationwide, accounting for 2 percent of all college students, 3 percent at community colleges and 4 percent at commercial, or profit-making, colleges, according to a survey by the United States Education Department in 2003-4.

That is up from 1.4 percent of all college students four years earlier. The figures do not include home-schooled students.

The existence of such students — eager, yet at high risk for failure — exposes a split in education policy. On one hand, believers in the standards movement frown on social promotion and emphasize measurable performance in high school.

At the same time, because a college degree is widely considered essential to later success, some educators say even students who could not complete high school should be allowed to attend college.

Nowhere is this contradiction more evident than in California. This year, 47,000 high school seniors, about 10 percent of the class, have not passed the exit examinations required to graduate from high school. They can still enroll in many colleges, although they are no longer eligible for state tuition grants.

State Senator Deborah Ortiz, Democrat of Sacramento, has proposed legislation to change that.

"As long as the opportunity to go to college exists for students without a diploma," Ms. Ortiz said, "qualifying students from poor or low-income families should remain entitled to college financial aid."

Many community colleges and two-year commercial colleges take these students, as do some less selective four-year colleges. At Interboro Institute, a large commercial college in Manhattan, 94 percent of the students last year did not have a high school diploma. Yet most received federal and state financial aid, up to $9,000 a student for the neediest.

At the College of New Rochelle, a four-year Catholic women's college whose main campus is in Westchester County, N.Y., students without high school degrees account for one-third of the students entering its School of New Resources, for those 21 or older, which has 4,500 students.

At Interboro, the state recently found cheating by employees on the exam students have to pass to qualify for state and financial aid. The college, part of EVCI Career Colleges Holding, said the problems were not pervasive.

Gov. George E. Pataki, however, tried to withdraw state tuition grants from students without high school diplomas this year. Mr. Pataki said the students should show their commitment to education and earn 24 college credits before the state gave them financial aid.

"In too many cases, students fail to graduate from college because they were admitted to programs for which they were academically underprepared," a spokesman for the governor, Scott Reif, said.

The State Legislature rejected the proposal. The state budget office estimated that it paid $29 million a year for 13,000 students who never graduated from high school to attend college.

In the late 1980's and early 90's, federal investigators found many commercial colleges effectively sweeping unqualified students, many without high school credentials, from the streets into their classrooms to collect their financial aid. The students then dropped out and defaulted on their government loans.

To prevent that, the government now requires that before students lacking high school credentials can qualify for financial aid, they have to pass a test approved by the federal Department of Education to show they have the "ability to benefit" from higher education.

New York awards those students a high school equivalency degree when they complete 24 college credits. But the State Education Department says colleges should be more selective in whom they admit. This month, it proposed that students without high school credentials be required to pass more demanding tests to show that they could handle a "collegiate program of study." Some federally approved tests are not at that level, department officials said.

Joan Bailey, senior vice president for academic affairs at the College of New Rochelle, said students without high school credentials at the School of New Resources were "not really different from the rest of our population."

"They graduate more or less at the same rate," Dr. Bailey said.

The City University of New York requires that high school dropouts earn equivalency degrees before enrolling, making just a few exceptions. "We want students to be as prepared as possible," a CUNY vice chancellor, Jay Hershenson, said. "And we are especially concerned that they not use up precious financial aid aimed at paying for college while learning high-school-level skills."

Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, N.Y., with 12,000 students, is one of the many SUNY campuses that welcome students without high school diplomas. Last fall, nearly 3 percent of the entering class lacked these credentials, double the 1.5 percent two years earlier. The admissions director, Mary Claire Bauer, said the college tried to help the students with counseling and other programs.

"We give everyone the opportunity to come to college," Ms. Bauer said. Still, she added, "The success rates are only so-so."

With the extra assistance, 37 percent of the group that entered in fall 2004 returned a year later, compared with 57 percent for the whole class.

The Hudson Valley students without high school diplomas are a diverse group. Brandy Micale, 28, arranges her college schedule around that of her young, autistic daughter. Ms. Micale, who left her adopted family at age 15 and quit school at 16, said that before she enrolled at Hudson Valley last semester, she had never written a research paper.

She has now written two. But when her daughter missed days at school, Ms. Micale did, too, and she had to drop a course after missing too many classes. Still, she finished the semester with 13 credits and a 3.66 average, she said, and is determined to earn a bachelor's degree.

"I'm on a mission now," she said. "I'm too old not to do this."

Patrick Rooney, 16, also entered Hudson Valley last semester without a high school diploma. Mr. Rooney is interested in drama and likes to perform Shakespeare. He said his high school classmates had made fun of him when he tried to discuss reading assignments in English class. Being in high school, he said, "was like being a rat in a cage."

Ms. Pointer, at Rockland for a year, said she had been reluctant to take the G.E.D., the exam that could have earned her an equivalency degree, because she had heard that it was difficult.

"And if you don't pass it, you don't have anything," she said. "I guess it was really a big fear of failure."

Going to college, she said, was far better. "This way, I am going to class, learning from it, studying for it," she said, "and when I pass and I have enough credits, I automatically get my equivalency diploma."

Ms. Pointer hopes to receive her equivalency degree soon and to continue for her associate's and bachelor's degrees. But she said that even without those, college had changed her.

"I realized what my priorities were," she said. "My priority is not my boyfriend. It is not hanging out. College was what I really wanted to do.

"I was talking to my mother a couple of weeks ago. She said, 'This is the longest you've stuck with anything. It looks like you'll have a diploma. Don't you feel proud of yourself?' "

    Can't Complete High School? Go Right Along to College, NYT, 30.5.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/education/30dropouts.html


 

Test Shows Drop in Science Achievement for 12th Graders        NYT

25.5.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/education/25exam.html

Test Shows Drop in Science Achievement

for 12th Graders

May 25, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

WASHINGTON, May 24 — The first nationwide science test administered in five years shows that achievement among high school seniors has declined across the past decade, even as scores in science rose among fourth graders and held steady among eighth graders, the federal Education Department reported on Wednesday.

The falling average science test scores among high school students appeared certain to increase anxiety about America's academic competitiveness and to add new urgency to calls from President Bush, governors and philanthropists like Bill Gates for an overhaul of the nation's high schools.

The drop in science proficiency appeared to reflect a broader trend in which some academic gains made in elementary grades and middle school have been seen to fade during the high school years.

The science results came from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a comprehensive examination administered in early 2005 by the Department of Education to more than 300,000 students in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and on military bases around the world.

"Our fourth graders are doing better — that's the good news," said Darvin M. Winick, chairman of the bipartisan body set up by Congress to oversee the test. "But the 12th-grade results are distressing, there's no other way to slice it. The Bush administration and just about everybody else is complaining about the high schools, and these results show there's really something to complain about."

The science test, which was administered in the first months of 2005, covered the earth, physical and life sciences. The science test was last given in 2000 and in 1996. The test administrators translate scores into three achievement levels: advanced, proficient and basic.

On the most recent test, 68 percent of fourth graders achieved at or above the basic level, compared with 63 percent on the 2000 and 1996 tests. Twenty-nine percent of fourth graders performed at or above the proficient level in 2005, up from 27 percent in 2000 and 28 percent in 1996.

The rising science achievement among fourth graders mirrored similar trends on nationwide reading and math tests released last fall. In interviews, analysts attributed those increases to the broad movements for higher standards and accountability that began in most states in the 1990's and gained force when President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind law in 2002.

The fourth-grade science results showed scores of black and Hispanic students rising more than those of white students, thus narrowing the gap between minority and white students who, on average, have traditionally scored much higher. But the gaps persisted or widened in the higher grades

Eighth-grade scores were largely unchanged from 10 years ago, with 59 percent of those tested scoring at or above the basic level in 2005, while 60 percent of students were at or above basic in 1996. Officials called those results disappointing, but the results from the nation's secondary schools were worse.

Among high school seniors, 54 percent performed at or above the basic level in science in 2005, compared with 57 percent in 1996. Eighteen percent of high school students performed at the proficient level in 2005, down from 21 percent in 1996.

To achieve at the basic level on the National Assessment, high school seniors must demonstrate knowledge of very basic concepts about the earth, physical and life sciences, and show a rudimentary understanding of scientific principles.

There was some debate on Wednesday about how to explain the 12th-grade declines.

Assistant Secretary of Education Tom Luce said they reflected a national shortage of fully qualified science teachers, especially in regions of poverty, where physics and chemistry classes are often taught by teachers untrained in those subjects.

"We lack enough teachers with content knowledge in math and science," Mr. Luce said. "We have too few teachers with majors or minors in math and science. That clearly is a problem."

Michael J. Padilla, a professor at the University of Georgia who is president of the National Science Teachers Association, said that the problem was not that universities were failing to train sufficient numbers of science majors or that too few were opting for classroom careers, but that about a third of those who accepted teaching jobs abandoned the profession within five years.

"What happens is that the system tends to beat them down," Mr. Padilla said. "Working conditions are poor, it's a difficult job, and the pay isn't that great."

Some teachers cited the decreasing amount of time devoted to science in schools, which they attributed in part to the annual tests in reading and math required by the No Child Left Behind law. That has led many elementary schools to cancel some science classes. On average, the time devoted to science instruction among elementary teachers across the nation declined from a weekly average of 2.6 hours in 2000 to 2.3 hours in 2004, Department of Education statistics show.

The No Child Left Behind law requires states to begin testing in science, however, in the 2007-2008 school year. P. John Whitsett, a physics teacher at Fond du Lac High School in Wisconsin who has taught science for 36 years, said that children who had the opportunity to study science in elementary school tended to develop an excitement for the field that lasted into high school. But when elementary and middle schools neglect science, students seek to avoid taking science courses in high school.

"Overall interest in science is down," Mr. Whitsett said.

The results showed considerable regional variations, with some states' scores stagnant or falling and others rising sharply. The National Assessment's report on the test praised five states — California, Hawaii, Kentucky, South Carolina and Virginia — because both fourth- and eighth-grade scores there improved from 2000 to 2005.

Michael Petrilli, a vice president at the Thomas Fordham Foundation, an educational research organization that supports testing, attributed the science successes in Virginia and California to what he described as those states' clearly defined science standards. And Kentucky, South Carolina and Virginia, he said, are among those states that hold local schools accountable for low science scores.

States must by law participate in the National Assessment's biennial reading and math exams. But the science test is voluntary, and New York and five other states — Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Pennsylvania — declined to help federal officials administer the test to a large enough number of students to allow their states' scores to be compared with those of other states.

A few students were tested even in the six states that did not participate fully, allowing the collection of a nationally representative sample.

Tom Dunn, a spokesman for New York's Department of Education, said that state officials decided not to participate fully in the federal science testing because during the spring of 2005 they were preoccupied with field trials for a series of new reading and math exams required by No Child Left Behind.

In New Jersey, 31 percent of fourth graders in public schools scored at proficient or above, compared with 33 percent in Connecticut. The national average for fourth graders attending public school was 27 percent scoring at proficient or above.

The report is available online at nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006466.

    Test Shows Drop in Science Achievement for 12th Graders, NYT, 25.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/education/25exam.html

Science scores up in grade four, stalled in grades 8 and 12

Updated 5/24/2006 3:02 PM ET
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — Elementary school children have made gains in science, based on the first national test in five years, but students in middle and high school have not escaped their rut.

The lackluster performance by older children underscores the deep concern among political and business leaders who see eroding science achievement as a threat to the U.S. economy.

A more hopeful sign is that young children are getting better at earth, physical and life sciences, according to test scores released Wednesday. That improvement comes even as their schools tend to focus on math and reading, subjects targeted by federal education law.

The 2005 science scores are from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal test given periodically in a range of topics. It is considered the best measure of how students perform over time and of how one state stacks up against another.

In a step forward on a national priority, black and Hispanic students narrowed their achievement gap with white students in fourth grade. But that good news was limited.

Racial gaps did not shrink in eighth grade, and the gap between blacks and whites even widened in 12th grade.

Overall science scores mirrored a recent pattern in other subjects: Elementary school kids improve, middle school students do not and high school students also stagnate or slip.

"It's perplexing," said Darvin Winick, chairman of the independent National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the test. "Almost everybody is on the high school reform bandwagon now, and all this report should do is fuel that fire a little more."

The 12th-grade scores have not changed since the science test was last given in 2000. But they have dropped over a longer, 10-year testing period, the only grade to see that slip.

Students were challenged to understand the principles of science, use their skills to investigate and apply science knowledge to solve everyday problems. Topics ranged from concepts of air and space to energy and motion to the functions of living organisms.

The goal is for all students to show they can handle challenging subject matter, a skill level known as proficient. In grades four and eight, fewer than one in three students — 29% — achieved at that level or better. Only 18% of 12th graders did that well.

The younger students, at least, are moving in the right direction.

Fourth-graders posted a better overall test score in science compared with 2000. The lowest-performing students made the gains, lifting the overall score. Yet even in fourth grade, the percentage of students who could handle challenging work did not improve.

Most states did not improve in science in grade four or eight. Federal officials did not test large enough samples of students to offer representative state data for grade 12.

The states posting the highest number of children who could handle challenging science material include Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Vermont and Virginia.

Among states with the lowest percentages of children doing proficient work are Alabama, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Louisiana, New Mexico, Nevada and Mississippi.

For Minnesota, 76% of fourth-graders performed at the basic level or better, meaning they had partial mastery of skills needed at their grade level, and 33% achieved the proficient level. Among 8th graders, 71% were at the basic level and 39% were rated proficient or better, meaning they were competent to handle challenging subject matter.

Minnesota Education Commissioner Alice Seagren said those scores put Minnesota students near the top nationally in science. Minnesota's eighth-grade average ranked lower than only five states and its fourth-grade average was lower than only seven states.

"While I'm pleased to see that Minnesota's students perform well compared to most students around the nation, we will continue to do more to prepare them to compete with students around the globe," Gov. Tim Pawlenty said. "Increased student achievement in science and math is critical to Minnesota's future success."

The federal science test is voluntary for states, and six did not take part: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, New York and Pennsylvania, along with the District of Columbia.

Boys outperformed girls in every grade tested.

Improving science has surged to the top of the education agenda for President Bush and Congress as corporate leaders, universities and scientific groups have pleaded for action. Science skills strongly influence how well workers can handle a huge range of today's jobs.

A National Academies panel has warned the U.S. faces such a crisis in math and science that today's children could have poorer prospects than their parents or grandparents.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, schools are graded — and face consequences for failure — only in math and reading, not science. Bush has proposed changing that.

The National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the Education Department, administers the test. A national sample of more than 300,000 students took the test in 2005.

    Science scores up in grade four, stalled in grades 8 and 12, UT, 24.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-05-24-science-scores_x.htm

With $4 Billion, Columbia Raises Fund-Drive Ante

May 21, 2006
The New York Times
By JONATHAN D. GLATER

The University of Virginia will announce a $3 billion fund-raising drive in the fall. New York University is in the middle of a $2.5 billion campaign. And officials at Columbia University say they are moving ahead with plans for the largest university campaign so far, a push to raise $4 billion over seven years.

These efforts are a sign of the fierce competition among major universities as they look to improve their rankings and images, attract students and grab star faculty members. Officials at elite institutions nationwide say that simply to keep up they must build athletic facilities and science centers, pursue research grants and donors, court big-name faculty members and stave off raids, and lay the foundation for eye-popping fund-raising campaigns.

"The whole higher education world is in a constant race," said Stephen J. Trachtenberg, president of George Washington University and a Columbia alumnus. "Money is the mother's milk of academic quality, because it pays for the people, which is to say professors and students, through salaries and scholarships, and it pays for the stuff, which is to say computers and libraries and laboratories and classrooms. Everybody needs more all the time."

Nearly every institution of higher learning feels the pressure, several university executives said, from public universities to the most elite. But for Columbia, competing against the wealthiest institutions of higher education in the nation, pressure is particularly acute.

Columbia's campaign would be the largest to date, said John Lippincott, president of the Council for Advancement in Support of Education, though he added that he thought a $5 billion campaign could not be far away as institutions' costs continue to rise and as the wealth of potential donors increases. Stanford University completed the first billion-dollar fund-raising drive in 1992.

"You almost can't not do this, if everybody else is doing it," said David W. Breneman, an economist and the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. "The right way to think about campaigns is that these kinds of schools are going to be in one forever."

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which tracks university fund-raising, 22 universities are in drives to raise $1 billion or more.

The City University of New York is two years into a $1.2 billion fund-raising campaign. Even Harvard, with the largest endowment in the nation, had been planning a new campaign until the resignation of its president, Lawrence H. Summers, put the plans on hold.

While tuition at elite institutions continues to rise, that income covers less than half the cost of a student's education, said Gordon C. Winston, a professor of economics at Williams College who has studied the finances of higher education for years. "The subsidies being given to students at the wealthy schools are huge," he said, and that is another reason that fund-raising matters.

Columbia's campaign, which has been quietly under way, but will be announced formally in the next academic year, is part of a drive by its president, Lee C. Bollinger, to overcome the institution's longstanding constraints: space and money to grow.

Columbia, which at year's end had an endowment of about $5.2 billion, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, had far less than Harvard, with $25.5 billion; Yale, $15.2 billion; and Stanford, $12.2 billion.

"All these things weave together: larger student body, larger faculty, more space in which to conduct our work," said Mr. Bollinger, who wants the campus to expand into Harlem over the next 20 to 30 years, spreading into an area bounded by Broadway to the east, 12th Avenue to the west, 125th Street to the south and 133rd Street to the north.

This initiative, known as the Manhattanville expansion, requires the approval of the city and faces strong resistance from residents of the affected community, hundreds of whom gathered outside Columbia's main gate to protest the plan last month.

Columbia officials also think the university must invest in higher-profile research, trying to protect a leading position in some areas and moving into new ones. To stand among the very best universities, Mr. Bollinger said, "requires more international students, more courses, more opportunities for students to be exposed to the world, development of new kinds of research capacities."

Last year, Mr. Bollinger came under heavy criticism for the way he had handled a showdown in the Middle East studies department when pro-Israel Jewish students complained that they were being intimidated by pro-Palestinian professors.

But Mr. Bollinger has weathered that storm, said several professors, including some past critics, and is now likely to be judged on the success of the fund-raising campaign and expansion. To be critical of Mr. Bollinger's leadership at this point, said David Helfand, chairman of the astronomy department, "would be extremely counterproductive."

John W. Morgan, a mathematics professor and chairman of the executive committee of the faculty of arts and sciences, said Mr. Bollinger's administration had reached out to include professors in the fund-raising campaign.

"He has taken some steps to try to reassure the faculty, and this has done some good," Professor Morgan said. For example, he cited the creation of a faculty fund-raising committee to work with the university's development office to identify needs and speak with potential donors. "It's a change in attitude."

In March, Columbia announced that it had received a $200 million gift to establish a neuroscience center that Columbia officials hope will be part of the Manhattanville expansion. The university also plans to put up a new science building above an existing athletic facility at the corner of Broadway and 120th Street.

Columbia has also shown a new forcefulness in recruiting faculty members. Last year, to strengthen its economics department, the institution put into effect the expensive strategy of making nearly 20 offers at once to rising-star economics professors around the country. Ten came, some defecting from rivals like Princeton and Harvard.

"I don't know that there's any arts and sciences department anywhere, at any time, that has been allowed to be that aggressive," said Donald Davis, chairman of the economics department.

But being aggressive was critical, he said; Columbia needed to be able to tell each prospective faculty member about the others, making the department more attractive. Now the university is preparing a similar push to strengthen the political science department.

Mr. Bollinger said the university would also invite more professors from other institutions to visit, taking advantage of the fact that many professors would like to live for a period in New York City.

"The New York City factor is worth billions in endowment," he said. "You give me the names of the 10 best people in any field, and I know I can recruit 2 or 3 of them to Columbia."

    With $4 Billion, Columbia Raises Fund-Drive Ante, NYT, 21.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/education/21columbia.html

Colleges Chase as Cheats Shift to Higher Tech

May 18, 2006
The New York Times
By JONATHAN D. GLATER

LOS ANGELES — At the University of California at Los Angeles, a student loaded his class notes into a handheld e-mail device and tried to read them during an exam; a classmate turned him in. At the journalism school at San Jose State University, students were caught using spell check on their laptops when part of the exam was designed to test their ability to spell.

And at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, after students photographed test questions with their cellphone cameras, transmitted them to classmates outside the exam room and got the answers back in text messages, the university put in place a new proctoring system.

"If they'd spend as much time studying," said an exasperated Ron Yasbin, dean of the College of Sciences at U.N.L.V., "they'd all be A students."

With their arsenal of electronic gadgets, students these days find it easier to cheat. And so, faced with an array of inventive techniques in recent years, college officials find themselves in a new game of cat and mouse, trying to outwit would-be cheats this exam season with a range of strategies — cutting off Internet access from laptops, demanding the surrender of cellphones before tests or simply requiring that exams be taken the old-fashioned way, with pens and paper.

"It is kind of a hassle," said Ryan M. Dapremont, 21, who just finished his third year at Pepperdine University, and has had to take his exams on paper.

"My handwriting is so bad," he said. "Whenever I find myself having to write in a bluebook, I find my hand cramps up more, and I can't write as quickly."

Mr. Dapremont said technology had made cheating easier, but added that plagiarism in writing papers was probably a bigger problem because students can easily lift other people's writings off the Internet without attributing them.

Still, some students said they thought cheating these days was more a product of the mind-set, not the tools at hand.

"Some people put a premium on where they're going to go in the future, and all they're thinking about is graduate school and the next step," said Lindsay Nicholas, a third-year student at U.C.L.A. She added that pressure to succeed "sometimes clouds everything and makes people do things that they shouldn't do."

In a survey of nearly 62,000 undergraduates on 96 campuses over the past four years, two-thirds of the students admitted to cheating. The survey was conducted by Don McCabe, a Rutgers professor who has studied academic misconduct and helped found the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke.

David Callahan, author of "The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead" (Harcourt, 2004), suggested that students today feel more pressure to do well in order to get into graduate or professional school and secure a job.

"The rational incentives to cheat for college students have grown dramatically, even as the strength of character needed to resist those temptations has weakened somewhat," Mr. Callahan said.

Whatever the reasons for cheating, college officials say the battle against it is wearing them out.

Though Brian Carlisle, associate dean of students at U.C.L.A., said most students did not cheat, he spoke wearily about cases of academic dishonesty.

He told of the student who loaded his notes onto the Sidekick portable e-mail device last fall; students who have sought help from friends with such devices; students who have preprogrammed calculators with formulas. Some students have even deigned to use the traditional cheat sheet, he said.

"One of the things that we're going to be paying close attention to as time goes on is the use of iPods," Professor Carlisle added, pointing out that with a wireless earpiece, these would be hard to detect.

The telltale iPod headphone wire proved the downfall of a Pepperdine student a couple of years ago, after he had dictated his notes into the portable music player and tried to listen to them during an exam.

"I have taught for 30 years and each year something new comes on the scene," Sonia Sorrell, the professor who caught the student, said in an e-mail message.

At the Anderson School of Management at U.C.L.A., the building's wireless Internet hotspot is turned off during finals to thwart Internet access.

Richard Craig, a professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State, who caught students using spell check last year, said that for tests, he arranged the classroom desks so that the students faced away from him but he could see their desktop screens.

"It was just a devilishly simple way to handle it," Professor Craig said.

At the University of Nevada, Professor Yasbin, the dean, was not the only one upset by the camera phone cheating episode there, which occurred in 2003; honest students were appalled, too. They suggested that they police one another, by being exam proctors.

"The students walk around the classroom, and if they see something suspicious, they report it," Professor Yasbin said.

Amanda M. Souza, a third-year undergraduate who heads the proctor program, said her classmates had decidedly mixed reactions to the student monitors.

"The ones that aren't cheating think it's a great idea, " she said. "You always see students who are really well prepared covering their papers. But the ones that aren't prepared, probably don't like us."

At Mercer County Community College in West Windsor, N.J., students must clear their calculators' memory and sometimes relinquish their cellphones before tests. At Brigham Young University, exams are given in a testing center, where electronic devices are generally banned.

In some classes at Butler University in Indianapolis, professors use software that allows them to observe the programs running on computers students are taking tests on. And some institutions even install cameras in rooms where tests are administered.

To take a final exam last week, Alyssa Soares, a third-year law student at U.C.L.A., had to switch on software that cut her laptop's Internet access, wireless capability and even the ability to read her own saved files. Her computer, effectively, became a glorified typewriter. Ms. Soares, 28, said she did not mind. "This is making sure everyone is on a level playing field," she said.

Several professors said they tried to write exams on which it was hard to cheat, posing questions that outside resources would not help answer. And at many institutions, officials said that they rely on campus honor codes.

Several professors said the most important thing was to teach students not to cheat in the first place.

Timothy Dodd, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity, said creating a "nuclear deterrent" to cheating in class, and perhaps implying that it is acceptable elsewhere, "is antithetical to what we should be doing as educators."

    Colleges Chase as Cheats Shift to Higher Tech, NYT, 18.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/education/18cheating.html?hp&ex=1148011200&en=d71bdd428e279963&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Flexibility Granted 2 States in No Child Left Behind

May 18, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASHINGTON, May 17 — After years of hearing state officials appeal for more flexibility in judging schools, the federal Department of Education is opening the door for a new way to measure student progress under the No Child Left Behind law.

Announced by Education Department officials on Wednesday, the change will allow two states, North Carolina and Tennessee, to track how individual students advance from year to year in reading and math. Currently under the federal law, states are measured solely on whether a progressively larger share of students are passing state exams each year.

How student achievement is measured under the law can be critical to states because a failure to improve student performance carries sanctions. Schools with mostly poor students that fail to show adequate yearly gains on test scores in key subjects must take steps to improve. If they do not, the law requires them to pay for student tutoring or to allow students to transfer to other schools.

Ultimately, chronically underperforming public schools could be forced to close.

Tennessee and North Carolina will be allowed to count students as meeting the goals of the law if the students are judged to be on a trajectory toward proficiency in reading and math in three or four years. Other states must show that students are actually reaching proficiency.

At a lunch with reporters, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said the change did not amount to a weakening of the law's demands for student achievement. "This is simply a different way to understand the progress that's being made," she said. She added that the law's requirement that all students in the nation reach proficiency by 2014 still stood.

The debate over how to measure student progress dates from the inception of No Child Left Behind, the sweeping law promoted by President Bush.

Some critics have maintained that schools should be judged on the progress made in elevating individual student performance from year to year. The law opted for a competing view: measuring success by how many students pass state exams each year. Many educators have called the requirement too rigid.

North Carolina and Tennessee applied for the flexibility as part of a pilot project that could involve as many as 10 states. Though 16 states submitted proposals, a panel of reviewers approved only the two states to start immediately.

The department said that six other states — Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Delaware, Florida and Oregon — would receive early consideration if they reapplied and made recommended changes to their proposals.

Congress is scheduled to update the law next year. Kati Haycock, executive director of the Education Trust, which helped review the applications from states to participate in the pilot project, said she hoped the experiments would produce data that would be useful when Congress looks to revise No Child Left Behind.

Mary Reel, senior executive director for assessment, evaluation and research at the Tennessee Department of Education, said, "You're going to see other states watching Tennessee and North Carolina closely."

In North Carolina, Lou Fabrizio, the State Education Department's senior accountability director, said the change would help states put resources where they are needed most. "There are limited resources that get stretched thin when you have a whole lot of schools not making" sufficient progress, Mr. Fabrizio said.

In North Carolina last year, 932 schools of 2,250 failed to meet the benchmark for adequate progress. Under the alternate measure, 40 fewer schools would have failed, Mr. Fabrizio said.

    Flexibility Granted 2 States in No Child Left Behind, NYT, 18.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/education/18education.html

Schools Plan in Nebraska Is Challenged

May 17, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

In a constitutional challenge to a state law that would divide the Omaha public schools into three racially identifiable districts, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sued the governor of Nebraska and other state officials yesterday in federal court in Omaha, arguing that the law "intentionally furthers racial segregation."

Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican, called the suit "a distraction" to recent talks intended to bring an accommodation among warring school superintendents. His spokesman said Nebraska's attorney general, Jon Bruning, also a Republican, would represent Mr. Heineman and the education officials named as defendants.

That task, however, may put Mr. Bruning in an awkward position. Before lawmakers passed the legislation and Mr. Heineman signed it on April 13, Mr. Bruning wrote that he expected legal challenges because its provisions dividing the Omaha district could violate the federal Constitution's equal protection clause.

"We believe the state may face serious risk due to the potential constitutional problems raised" by the law, Mr. Bruning wrote in a letter distributed to lawmakers. Mary Nelson, a spokeswoman, said yesterday that the attorney general had not yet read the lawsuit and would not comment.

The law, intended to resolve a boundary dispute between the Omaha schools and largely white suburban districts, created a learning community of area school districts that would operate with a common tax levy and required them to draw up an integration plan for metropolitan Omaha.

An amendment that passed late in the legislative session required that the Omaha public schools be split by 2008 into three districts following the attendance areas of existing high schools. The lawsuit argues that because Omaha is racially segregated by neighborhood, dividing the district that way would create one largely black, one largely white and one mostly Hispanic district.

The suit says the law violates the constitutional principle that in public education "the doctrine of separate but equal has no place."

The prime force behind the provision of the law under challenge was Senator Ernie Chambers, Nebraska's only black legislator, who argued that Omaha schools were already segregated and that the plan would allow blacks to control a district in which their children were a majority.

Theodore M. Shaw, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., who filed the suit on behalf of the Omaha branch of the N.A.A.C.P., said he respected Mr. Chambers's effort to give minority communities increased control over school administration.

"But we disagree with actions that will exacerbate segregation in the public schools," Mr. Shaw said. "I mean this is 2006, in a society that is diverse and multicultural."

    Schools Plan in Nebraska Is Challenged, NYT, 17.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/us/17naacp.html

States Struggle to Computerize School Records

May 15, 2006
The New YorkTimes
By SAM DILLON

Nearly all states are building high-tech student data systems to collect, categorize and crunch the endless gigabytes of attendance logs, test scores and other information collected in public schools — and the projects in some states seem to have gone haywire.

In North Carolina, a statewide school computer system known as NC WISE is years behind schedule, and estimated costs have risen to $250 million. Teachers have nicknamed it NC Stupid. California has spent $60 million on a system, and officials estimated that the state would spend an additional $60 million in coming years to help school districts connect to it.

And in Idaho, a private foundation spent $21 million on a data system for the public schools but pulled out when estimated completion costs hit $180 million.

"It metastasized way beyond the original concept," said Jason Hancock, an education analyst for the Idaho Legislature. "Costs ballooned, and the funders just pulled the plug."

The state-by-state drive is one of the nation's largest computerization efforts. Many states began planning initiatives after President Bush's signature education law, No Child Left Behind, was signed in 2002, requiring schools to report rivers of student data.

A number of states also hoped that by tracking the achievement of individual students from year to year, they could make the data more useful and more accurately answer questions like which schools were producing the strongest growth and how many students drop out of high school. With projects under way from Maine to Hawaii, the efforts are costing taxpayers several billion dollars a year.

The problems have been especially severe in North Carolina and Idaho, but efforts in many states have cost more or taken longer than expected.

There are success stories. Georgia has a running system that will track grades and test results for each of the state's 1.3 million students from year to year and school to school, allowing administrators to compare student achievement with factors like school expenditures.

Begun in 2003, the system cost $14.5 million, said Howard Woodard, chief information officer for the Georgia Department of Education. But the state spent at least $85 million on unsuccessful earlier efforts, including one championed by Roy E. Barnes when he was governor.

"I spent $50 million trying to put together a student information system that would work, and it frustrated the heck out of me," said Mr. Barnes, a Democrat who served from 1998 to 2002 and is now a co-chairman of a private bipartisan commission reviewing the workings of the No Child Left Behind law.

Mr. Barnes, a supporter of annual testing, says he remains convinced that statewide data systems are crucial for making the federal law's accountability provisions work.

"But many states can never quite get it together," he said. "These systems are expensive, arcane, and some principals and teachers groups don't want them to work." He urged the federal government to offer increased technical help to states building the systems.

Valerie Smith, a spokeswoman, said the federal Department of Education frequently invited state data managers to meetings to offer technical assistance. And in November, the Education Department awarded $52.8 million in grants to 14 states to help them build computer systems that are described as longitudinal because they track student records from year to year.

Mary Ann Wolf, executive director of the State Education Technology Directors Association, said her organization saw in the new data systems the potential to help teachers zone in on individual students' learning needs. The federal aid, she said, is a "great beginning," but "only a drop in the bucket" relative to what it costs even one state to develop a full-blown student data system.

"These systems are incredibly costly," Ms. Wolf said.

Most large computerization projects are complex and challenging. But building a data system to collect information from all the schools in a state can be extraordinarily daunting, involving the integration of computer systems used in hundreds of districts, each of which may have multiple databases using distinct operating systems.

The National Center for Educational Accountability, a group affiliated with the University of Texas, conducted a survey last year of states' educational technology plans and found that at least 48 states were building longitudinal student data systems.

The survey found Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Utah to have some of the most advanced statewide data systems.

The projects vary, but 36 states have assigned a statewide number to every student, a prerequisite for tracking individual student data year to year and school to school. Schools often keep information on tests, grades, discipline, finances and teachers in separate databases, and many states are now building data warehouses that enable them to integrate with one another. New York, for instance, is spending $32.1 million over several years to build a state data repository system.

Some states also want to give parents the ability to track their child's attendance and achievement through a secure Web site.

North Carolina officials have been working for years to build NC WISE, short for Windows of Information on Student Education, to manage student attendance, grades and test reports; schedule classes; and give teachers and principals quick access to a student's entire record, from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Glitches had already appeared in the system when I.B.M. bought out an original contractor in 2002. By last fall, NC WISE had been extended to one-third of the state's 2,200 schools at a cost of $110 million and had built a reputation for sluggishness and freezing. In February, North Carolina canceled I.B.M.'s contract, and state officials said they hoped to finish the system by 2008, at an additional cost of $140 million.

Clint Roswell, an I.B.M. spokesman, said the company had helped develop "a highly comprehensive system" and had fulfilled its contractual obligations.

But Tito Craige, chairman of the social studies department at East Chapel Hill High School, said the system had infuriated teachers by requiring multiple passwords in a session, by losing enrollment and grading data, by reporting late students as absent, and by crashing when thousands of teachers across the state signed on simultaneously.

Philip Price, an associate superintendent in the North Carolina Department of Education, said the state had learned from the project.

"The lesson is, don't bite off more than you can chew," Mr. Price said.

Officials at the J. A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation described a similarly painful learning experience in December 2004.

"We underestimated the challenges and overpromised on results," the foundation said.

The foundation had sought to link Idaho's 114 school districts in a system that would help teachers log attendance and record grades, and parents to monitor test scores and attendance from a home computer. But after 29 districts had been wired in at a cost of $21 million, a consultant warned that the project would cost $180 million to complete.

Shawn Bay, the founder and chief executive of eScholar, a software company that has helped build successful student data warehouses in 20 states, said that efforts to build educational data warehouses failed no more frequently than similarly large-scale efforts in the corporate world. He pointed out, though, that student data is harder to collect and manipulate than product data.

"If you're tracking boxes of toothpaste, all are essentially the same size and flavor," Mr. Bay said. "But every student is different, and tying together all the information schools collect about them is incredibly complex."

In several states, school computerization projects have run off the rails because the officials designing them failed to consult with the schools. In North Dakota, for instance, many of the state's 218 districts, many of them with only one tiny rural school, rebelled after Department of Public Instruction officials spent $2.4 million on a system that teachers and administrators found clumsy to use.

In December, under pressure from the Legislature, the department canceled its contract with the company that built the system. A report in March by Robert R. Peterson, the state auditor, said the department "did not encourage input from the school districts in the planning."

The California Legislature has spent $60 million since 1997 to develop an "electronic statewide school information system."

Maine officials said they had spent five years building the Maine Education Data Management System, at a cost of about $5 million, and are still working kinks out of it.

"It's been a painful few years," said Charlotte Ellis, a systems analyst for the Maine Department of Education.

    States Struggle to Computerize School Records, NYT, 15.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/education/15computers.html?hp&ex=1147752000&en=fc46d4cd2e4690cf&ei=5094&partner=homepage

School Cellphone Ban Is Enforced, and Parents Howl, Too

April 27, 2006
The New York Times
By ELISSA GOOTMAN

During the final stretch of David Ritter's hourlong trip to middle school, he pulls a cellphone from his jeans and calls his mother in Washington Heights to say he is out of the subway and moments from the Salk School of Science on East 20th Street.

"It's one thing I can cross off my list of things to worry about," his mother, Elizabeth Lorris Ritter, said. "It's a required part of our everyday life. We have a refrigerator, we have running water, we have cellphones."

Cellphones are the urban parent's umbilical cord, the lifeline connecting them to children on buses, emerging from subways, crisscrossing boroughs and traipsing through unknown neighborhoods.

Though the phones have been banned in New York City schools for years, parents say that many schools without metal detectors have operated under a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy, with the cellphones ignored as long as they do not ring in the middle of class.

But as the city began random security scanning at middle and high schools yesterday in its latest effort to seize weapons, the gap between school rules and parents' expectations has set off a furor. Some principals recently sent home letters reminding parents that cellphones are not allowed, and at the one school searched yesterday, 129 cellphones were confiscated.

Anxious parents say that cellphones are not a frill but the mortar holding New York City's families together in these times of demanding schedules, mounting extracurricular activities, tutoring sessions and long treks to school.

Some of these parents, also fearful of child predators and terrorist attacks, say that sending their children to school without cellphones is unimaginable. "I have her call me when she gets out of school, and she's supposed to get on the bus right away," Lindsay Walt, an artist, said of her daughter, Eve Thomson, 11, a sixth grader at Salk. "Then I have her call me when she gets off the bus, and I have her call me when she gets in the house. The chancellor will have civil disobedience on his hands. No one in New York is going to let their child go to school without a cellphone."

Dr. Moira Kennedy, a psychiatrist with daughters at the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies and at Stuyvesant High School, said the policy indicated "a disregard for the concerns of parents," adding, "I think it shows a big lack of awareness of the essential nature of having a way to communicate with your child during the day."

Police officers set up a random scanning operation at the Acorn High School for Social Justice in Brooklyn yesterday, Department of Education officials said. Along with the 129 cellphones, 10 CD players and two iPods were confiscated, along with a box cutter and a knife that was left in a trash can. A student carrying marijuana ran away after seeing the scanning operation, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said. The electronic items will be returned.

Chancellor Klein defended the scanning and the cellphone ban yesterday, telling reporters that students had used cellphones to take pictures in locker rooms, cheat on exams and summon friends to start fights.

"We all understand the concerns that parents are talking about, but I think they have to see it from our point of view," he said. "There is always an enforcement issue, but the enforcement issue doesn't mean the policy is wrong. And obviously through the work we're doing now, I think that will improve enforcement."

Dumbfounded students said cellphones were essential, so familiar they were like an extra limb. But they had different reasons from their parents'. "I feel so empty," said May Chom, 14, speaking wistfully after hearing of the policy and leaving her phone at home in Queens. With no cellphone, May said, there was also no way to listen to music on the way to the Lab School, on West 17th Street, making for a "really, really boring" trip.

Another Lab student, Noah Benezra, 18, carried his phone yesterday despite the new scanning program, saying it was "pretty much vital" to his social life.

Blocks away, Ayoni Warburton, 17, made no effort to conceal her cellphone, arriving at the High School of Fashion Industries with it prominently affixed to her hip.

"Electronics are part of the fashion statement," she said, adding, "My mother calls me a lot."

A fellow student, who identified himself as Jose but was whisked inside the school by safety agents before he could give his last name, said he needed his phone for emergencies.

"Don't lie — girls," corrected his friend.

At the Acorn school, Lisa Miller, an English teacher, said the phones were a distraction, adding, "If it's really an emergency, the parents can call the school."

Parents say they are not satisfied with that answer, or even with efforts by some principals to distance themselves from the cellphone ban by assuring parents that phones takes during random security checks will be returned.

"We sit here and we tell our parents, 'Care about your kids, do this, do that,' and then you say, 'You've just lost that safety net that you rely on,' " said Jane Reiff, a Queens parent whose daughter Nikki, 12, uses her cellphone to call for a ride if the friends she usually walks home with are out sick. "It's just not safe out there."

Kate Hammer contributed reporting for this article.

    School Cellphone Ban Is Enforced, and Parents Howl, Too, NYT, 27.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/nyregion/27schools.html

Richer areas more successful in attracting qualified teachers

Posted 4/24/2006 3:11 PM ET
USA Today
By Ledyard King, Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON — Public school teachers in the nation's wealthiest communities continue to be more qualified than those in the poorest despite a federal law designed to provide all children equal educational opportunity.

Preliminary data released by the Department of Education show that in 39 states, the chance of finding teachers who know their subjects are better in elementary schools where parents' incomes are highest. The data show that's also the case among middle and high schools in 43 states.

"Obviously we have a long way to go," said Rene Islas, who monitors teacher quality for the Department of Education. "Even if you have high numbers (of certified instructors) in the aggregate, there are pockets where students are being taught by teachers that are not highly qualified."

Under the No Child Left Behind law President Bush signed in 2002, states are supposed to have "highly qualified teachers" for all of their core academic courses, such as math, English and science, by the end of this school year. States that don't face a loss of federal funding.

As of the 2004-05 school year, nearly 91% of schools nationwide reported having highly qualified teachers for those courses, up from 86% the year before. Montana reported the highest compliance rate at 99.4%. Several, including Hawaii, California and South Carolina, were below 80%.

The numbers are improving at a slightly faster rate for schools in the poorest neighborhoods, where nearly 87% of classes had a qualified teacher last year compared to 93% for those in the most affluent areas.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has told state officials she is willing to extend the deadline as long as they make a "good-faith effort" to meet the goal. The law gives states latitude to define what a highly qualified teacher is, but federal officials have said that at a minimum instructors must hold a bachelor's degree, have state certification and show mastery of their subject.

Skeptics, such as Nevada Schools Superintendent Keith Rheault, call the 100% target unattainable largely because they say the process for training teachers can't keep up with the demand.

"We'll never catch up," said Rheault, whose state reported having a 68% compliance rate last year. "When you hire 3,000 new teachers a year, you can't get them all highly qualified."

With low test scores and high drop-out rates, schools in high-poverty areas have historically had a tougher time attracting and keeping good teachers than their more affluent neighbors.

A lack of quality teachers can be found as well in pockets of well-to-do areas, such as Prince George's County, Md. Only 62% of classes taught in that Washington, D.C., suburb met the standard last year.

Prince George's parent Darren Brown said he was so frustrated by a lack of certified teachers in his youngest daughter's public school that he sent her to private school. He also successfully pressured his eldest daughter's public school to replace her substitute algebra teacher of three months with a qualified instructor.

"I had to make a move," said Brown, a procurement official with the Federal Highway Administration who also is president of the county PTA. "When you're dealing with your child's education, you can't take a chance."

Seventeen states are responding to the challenge by offering bonuses, scholarships and other incentives to prospective teachers who sign up for "hard-to-staff" schools, according to the Denver-based Education Commission of the States. For example, New York City is offering up to $15,000 in housing support to attract teachers of math, science or special education.

Nevada tries a different tack, giving principals at high-poverty schools first crack at new teachers. Instructors who refuse an assignment can be removed from the hiring list for a year.

"They can be shut out," Rheault said.

    Richer areas more successful in attracting qualified teachers, UT, 24.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-04-24-education_x.htm

Archdiocese Spares 6 Schools, but Decides That 9 Will Close

April 22, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

Mary George, the principal of Our Lady of Sorrows in Manhattan, broke down and cried at her home when she got the news: her school had been spared.

Sister Nora McArt, a teacher for 37 years at St. Martin of Tours in the Bronx, leapt for joy after getting a call on her cellphone. "It was just hard to believe," she said, "after all that we've been through."

Last month, Roman Catholic officials with the Archdiocese of New York announced recommendations for a major overhaul of parishes and schools in the metropolitan New York region. In all, 31 parishes were proposed for closing, along with 14 schools; two more sets of schools were recommended for potential mergers.

But after listening to appeals over the past few weeks from all but one school on the list, archdiocesan officials announced yesterday that only nine schools would close — eight on the original closing list and one that was initially recommended to merge with another school. That meant parents, teachers and principals at six schools — a higher number than many had expected — found themselves celebrating a new lease on life yesterday.

"We are experiencing the resurrection for which we and so many have prayed and worked so hard," Sister Nora said.

Archdiocesan officials had emphasized early on that their recommendations were just that, merely recommendations, and that nothing had been made final. They have been giving both parish and school officials the opportunity to appeal their cases, advising them to come prepared not just with emotional pleas but with hard facts.

Officials for the archdiocese, which covers parishes and schools from Staten Island in the south to the Catskills in the north, have been hurrying over the last few weeks to make final decisions on the school closings because teacher contracts have to be renewed for next year. No timetable has been set for the parishes.

Catholic schools were on Easter break yesterday, so the news — both positive and negative — spread in telephone chains and e-mail messages.

At St. Mary Star of the Sea on City Island in the Bronx, the school's principal, Jane Dennehy, announced the good news on the school's answering machine: "We have received word today that we will remain open," she said. "We're all set to go, with a long, happy future ahead of us."

The news was bad, however, for Our Lady of Solace in the Van Nest neighborhood in the Bronx, where the television personality Regis Philbin went to school. The Rev. John Knapp, the parish pastor, said he had been holding out hope after what he thought was a positive meeting with archdiocesan officials. "It's very painful," he said. "It's like knowing that a loved one is dying. You think you know how you're going to react, but you realize you're never prepared for it."

The sparing of a sizable number of schools on the list raised questions among some people about whether archdiocesan officials could have handled the process better, meeting with teachers, parents and principals from the various schools before making any closing recommendations.

"They should have done more research," said Audrey Cabbell, a teacher and parent at St. Mary Star of the Sea.

The recommendations caused panic in many school communities, setting off a flurry of rallies and prayer vigils, as well as angry accusations about the archdiocese's motives.

At St. Martin of Tours, in the East Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx, alumni rallied to support the school, members of the community dashed off letters to the archdiocese and parents gathered signatures for a petition to keep the school open.

At other places, the rallies and other efforts to drum up support proved to be to no avail.

"Angry is not the word," said Ina Allick, whose two sons attend Resurrection School in Upper Manhattan. "Outraged is more like it."

Ms. Allick helped organize a rally for parents and had been trying to get them to register for next year to prop up the school's enrollment. The school had signed up 85 students, she said, far more than what it had at this time last year, putting it on track to grow from its current size of 130 students.

"I feel we were railroaded," she said.

All the schools on the final closing list, as well as those that were spared, have seen their enrollments drop precipitously over the last few years, in most cases dipping well below 200, according to archdiocesan statistics.

But Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said the schools that were saved presented enough information in their appeals to convince officials that the dwindling enrollment figures could be reversed.

"Each school was different, but the overriding factor in each case was they presented sufficient information for us to expect their enrollment not only to stabilize but also to increase," he said. "The other schools, although they were very impassioned about their school, there just was not enough there for us to say this school deserves that extra chance to turn their situation around."

He added that archdiocesan officials would keep a close eye on the six schools that were spared this time around to "make sure what we now believe will happen actually does happen."

The officials began calling principals and pastors, many of whom had been waiting anxiously all week for word, early yesterday morning.

Mrs. George, of Our Lady of Sorrows on Manhattan's Lower East Side, said she began to weep as soon as she realized that her school was safe. Then she got off the phone and went into the bathroom and cried some more. She had been praying desperately over the last few weeks to St. Anne, her late mother's namesake.

"I'm going to church on Sunday," she said. "I'm going to light a candle. My mother came through."

    Archdiocese Spares 6 Schools, but Decides That 9 Will Close, NYT, 22.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/nyregion/22church.html

Boys Are No Match for Girls in Completing High School

April 19, 2006
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

Nationwide, about 72 percent of the girls in the high school class of 2003 — but only 65 percent of the boys — earned diplomas, a gender gap that is far more pronounced among minorities, according to a report being released today by the Manhattan Institute.

The report, "Leaving Boys Behind: Public High School Graduation Rates," found that 59 percent of African-American girls, but only 48 percent of African-American boys, earned their diplomas that year. Among Hispanics, the graduation rate was 58 percent for girls, but only 49 percent for boys.

"It's a fairly large difference, particularly when you consider that unlike differences across racial and ethnic groups, boys and girls are raised in the same households, so it's not so easy to explain the differences by their community, or their income level," said Jay P. Greene, an author of the report.

Mr. Greene helped set off widespread national alarm with findings several years ago that almost one in three high school students, and almost half the African-American and Hispanic students, did not complete high school. His research has been widely embraced by policy makers, though some researchers argue that his method overstates the dropout problem over all and among minorities in particular.

Mr. Greene's new report found that New York ranks third from last among the states, with 58 percent of its students graduating. (Georgia and South Carolina are lower.) New York also has the lowest African-American graduation rate, 38 percent, and the lowest Hispanic graduation rate, 29 percent.

The report compiles data on high school graduation, by school district, state, race and sex. The researchers say it is the first study to offer such a complete picture of the gender gap, in part, because information broken down by sex has only recently been available.

Among educators, it is common knowledge that girls outperform boys in high school and are more likely to go on to college. But Mr. Greene's study is among the first to compile broad data on the trend in high school completion by district, state and race.

"This is the first time we've been able to compile this by our method," Mr. Greene said. "We've seen that high school girls outperform boys on other measures, and they're all symptoms of the same disease."

By Mr. Greene's calculations, none of the nation's 10 largest school districts, which together educate more than 8 percent of American public school children, graduate more than 60 percent of their students.

Among the nation's 100 largest school districts, the Manhattan Institute report found, New York City had the third lowest overall graduation rate, 43 percent. The two lower districts were Detroit and San Bernardino, Calif.

In New York City, 47 percent of the girls and 39 percent of the boys graduated from high school. Among Asian-American high school students in New York, 68 percent of the girls and 54 percent of the boys got diplomas, as did 43 percent of the African-American girls and 33 percent of the African-American boys, and 37 percent of the Hispanic girls and 30 percent of the Hispanic boys.

Graduation rates have long been one of the most slippery topics in education, with districts choosing their own ways to account for, or ignore, students who drop out, are pushed into equivalency programs or simply leave the district.

Mr. Greene's findings are based on school districts' data that states report to the federal government. His findings have come under fire from other researchers, including Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute. Mr. Mishel emphasizes that he, too, believes that African-American and Hispanic graduation rates are alarmingly low, but he says that Mr. Greene's work seriously exaggerates the problem.

In a recent opinion article in Education Week, Mr. Mishel estimates that 73 percent of African-Americans get high school diplomas. He bases his calculations on data from census surveys. He also cites studies from New York City and Florida finding graduation rates at least 10 percentage points higher than Mr. Greene finds. Mr. Mishel says high school graduation rates have been improving, especially among blacks. In contrast, Mr. Greene says graduation rates have been relatively flat for years.

The disagreement among the researchers is partly about different sets of data. It also mirrors political differences between the conservative Manhattan Institute, which favors school choice, and the liberal Economic Policy Institute, which has strong ties to unions.

"They're using two different types of data, and each has its own problems," said Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economics professor who does her own education research. "The truth lies somewhere in between."

    Boys Are No Match for Girls in Completing High School, NYT, 19.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/education/19graduation.html

New York Offers Housing Subsidy as Teacher Lure

April 19, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

New York City will offer housing subsidies of up to $14,600 to entice new math, science and special education teachers to work in the city's most challenging schools, in one of the most aggressive housing incentive programs in the nation to address a chronic shortage of qualified educators in these specialties.

To be eligible for the subsidies, teachers must have at least two years' experience. City officials said they hoped the program, to be announced by the city Education Department today, would immediately lead to the hiring of an extra 100 teachers for September and, with other recruitment efforts, ultimately help fill as many as 600 positions now held by teachers without the proper credentials.

Under terms of the program, negotiated with the city teachers' union, the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will pay as much as $5,000 up front to the recruits for housing expenses, including the cost of moving to the New York area, a down payment on buying a home, or broker fees and security deposits for renters.

The program will also pay a $400 monthly housing stipend for two years. Teachers can live wherever they want within the metropolitan region but must commit to work for three years in one of New York City's toughest middle schools or high schools. The city's effort comes as the nation faces a chronic shortage of math, science and special education teachers that has sparked heavy competition to court such educators.

City education officials said they planed to market the new program forcefully on recruiting trips to the Northwest, the Southeast and especially California, where housing costs are also high.

Former New York City teachers who have been out of the system for at least two years will also be eligible for the subsidies. Teachers already living in the New York area who switch to the city schools could simply use the money to pay their existing rent or mortgage.

"What you are starting to see is a very different compensation structure for teachers in the City of New York, different from the traditional lockstep thinking on teacher pay and seniority," Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said in an interview yesterday, "based on system need and performance."

Mr. Klein also cited a provision in the latest city teachers' contract, approved this fall, that created a new master teacher position with additional pay of $10,000 a year. "The differentials will have power to attract people," Mr. Klein said, "to give our city a competitive advantage."

Depending on experience, teachers eligible for the subsidies will earn base salaries of $45,600 to $69,840 a year.

The city projects that the housing assistance will cost about $15,000 per teacher, including federal payroll taxes and other ancillary charges, for a total of perhaps $1.5 million a year until the shortage abates.

While that is a relatively minor sum in the context of the system's annual budget of more than $15 billion, officials said the program had a value that far outstripped its cost.

"It has a major impact as far as really sending a signal to those teachers that we want you and will be really creative in attracting you here," said Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, the mayor's top education aide at City Hall.

Elizabeth Arons, the city Education Department's chief executive for human resources, said that for September the city expected that it would need to hire 800 math teachers, 450 science teachers and 1,300 special education teachers simply to fill routine vacancies created by retirements, sabbaticals, leaves of absence and attrition.

Most of these jobs will be staffed by participants in alternative teaching certification programs like Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows, she said. Even once these positions are filled, there will be about 100 to 200 positions in each specialty filled by a teacher not specifically certified for that subject.

It is common for science teachers to be assigned to math classes and vice versa and in some schools English and history teachers also must teach math and science.

Ms. Arons said the housing incentives were aimed at experienced teachers from other districts and those who had left the profession largely because there were so few teachers coming out of graduate schools certified to teach science or math.

"There are no math and science teachers coming out of universities," she said. "This is not anything that's new, it's across the nation. It's been talked about for the last 20 years. We are all faced with the alternative structures."

The shortage of math and science teachers has recently moved to the forefront of the nation's education agenda. According to a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, nearly 60 percent of eighth graders in American schools — double the international average — are taught math by teachers who neither majored in math nor studied it to pass a certification exam.

President Bush this year proposed to retrain teachers to increase the ranks of advanced placement and international baccalaureate teachers in math and science by 70,000 over four years.

The shortage of qualified math and science and special education teachers has also become a much more urgent problem for states and school districts because of the federal No Child Left Behind law, which sanctions schools that do not make sufficient annual progress in certain subjects.

The law currently requires annual testing in English and math and will mandate testing in science beginning in the 2007-8 school year. In addition, states and districts must show progress among various subgroups of students, among them children receiving special education services.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers' union, the United Federation of Teachers, said that her union had growing concerns that the state might force the transfer of veteran teachers into struggling schools if steps were not taken to create incentives and get volunteers.

"We solved the problem in probably one of the most innovative ways we could," she said. "Affordable housing is really important to recruit and retain teachers."

The deal marked a rare example of cooperation between the union and the Bloomberg administration.

While other school districts across the country have sought to make housing more affordable for teachers, experts said New York City's program appeared to be one of the most concerted and generous efforts specifically aimed at teachers in subject areas with the worst shortages. Chicago, for instance, offers up to $7,500 in housing aid to all teachers but requires newly hired teachers to live in the city.

In California, a state program offers teachers substantial help with the down payment on a home that depending on the local market can amount to $20,000 or more. But the money must be repaid.

And some local districts, like Santa Clara and San Jose, in extremely hot housing markets have their own programs that include monthly stipends or subsidized rentals in district-owned housing developments. When programs are combined, some teachers can get as much as $100,000 in home-buying help, said Ken Giebel, a spokesman for the California Housing Finance Agency. But much of the money has to be repaid.

In New York City, teachers who get the housing assistance would likely also be eligible for four years of up to $3,400 in annual tuition reimbursement from New York State under a separate incentive plan promoted by the Pataki administration several years ago to recruit educators into high-needs schools.

And they would potentially be eligible to use their housing assistance from the city in conjunction with an existing federal program called Teacher Next Door that offers teachers the chance to buy homes in depressed urban neighborhoods at half price.

Andrew M. Cuomo, who as federal housing secretary helped create the Teacher Next Door program, praised New York City's new effort. "It's smart," said Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat who is running for State Attorney General. "The cities tend to pay lower salaries than the surrounding suburbs and the cost of housing is higher, so it's double trouble."

Teachers receiving housing assistance will have to sign a contract requiring them to repay part of the money if they fail to serve three years in a struggling school.

    New York Offers Housing Subsidy as Teacher Lure, NYT, 19.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/nyregion/19teach.html?hp&ex=1145505600&en=b7e2df0ab4318b8d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Some Parents Let Children Choose College, and Pay

April 10, 2006
The New York Times
By JONATHAN D. GLATER

Alexandra Baldari and her parents have talked a good deal over the past year about how to pay for her college education, and the upshot is this: If she enrolls at the University of Miami in the fall, she will bear much of the cost, which could total $40,000 or more a year, on her own.

"The problem here," said Ms. Baldari, who lives in Parkland, Fla. "is I'm 18 and looking to go to college, and my parents are looking to retire."

Ms. Baldari's parents earn about $100,000 a year, but her mother, Anne Angelopoulos, said little is left after paying for housing, three cars, gas, food and utilities, as well as saving to contribute to Ms. Baldari's 11-year-old brother's education. Ms. Baldari's parents prepaid for her to attend a public university in Florida, but she does not want to go to a public institution. The Florida Prepaid College Program allows parents to lock in the cost of college in the future by paying at today's prices.

"We did in fact plan for this and anticipate this and have it covered, in our opinion, but she has made a choice," Ms. Angelopoulos said, adding that the prepaid money could be applied to tuition at a private university but would not cover all of it. She said that while the family was trying to come up with ways to reduce how much their daughter would have to borrow, they did not see how they could take on more debt. "This is where we draw the line."

More middle- and upper-middle-class parents are drawing similar lines, limiting what they will pay for higher education. While financing has long been a strain, parents seem willing today to pass more of the burden on to their children, financial aid officers say. Many are worried about affording retirement and say their fixed costs eat up their income. Others have not saved enough or are helping pay for care for their aging parents.

"What I've really seen in the last 10 years is a generational shifting of the responsibility" to pay for college, said Ellen Frishberg, director of student financial services at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "Our parents helped us pay for school. These parents are not as willing to help their children pay for school."

There are no data directly measuring shifts in who bears the cost of college. But financial aid officers at institutions from Johns Hopkins to the University of California, Los Angeles, to Carleton College say they have observed a shift in recent years.

Tuition and fees at many colleges have long exceeded the amount of money that students themselves are permitted to borrow for college costs under the federal loan programs. Parents, however, can borrow up to the cost of attendance under federal programs, known as PLUS loans.

But although the aggregate volume of federal loans to parents has risen over time, it is far outstripped by the total of private loans for education from banks, the number of which has increased steeply. Private lending is the fastest-growing piece of higher education finance and, responding to demand, more banks are expanding their offerings.

In 2004-5, for example, there were $13.8 billion in private loans for graduate and undergraduate education, up from $10.4 billion the previous school year. Meanwhile, the amount of parental PLUS loans, which 10 years ago nearly doubled that of private loans, totaled $8.4 billion in 2004-5. This is true even though private loans typically have less generous terms than federal government loans do: higher and variable interest rates, and interest that accrues even while the student is still in college, for example.

Although there are no statistics on whether those taking out private education loans are students or parents, financial aid officers said it seemed unlikely that parents could account for all of the increased private borrowing because they could get more favorable rates under the government program. They suggested that the private loan activity is indirect evidence of a phenomenon they have noticed anecdotally.

And they fear that after graduation, students may be left with onerous debt burdens.

Still, some students say they are unwilling to let financial constraints dictate where they go to college. Thomas W. Dillon, 20, of Warwick, R.I., decided to go to the University of Connecticut over the University of Rhode Island, where his parents would have covered tuition, and faces tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

"The way I see it is, I only get to go to college once," Mr. Dillon said. "If I have to pay an extra $20,000 a year, that's what I have to do."

Some parents may be asking their children to borrow for their higher education but then assisting them in the repayment, but that is difficult to discern. Mr. Dillon expects to receive some repayment help, for example.

And the pattern is not evident at elite institutions like Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Officials at these colleges suggest that parents may view the cost of tuition there as worth any sacrifice.

"It's such a new phenomenon that there's not a lot to compare it to," said Christine W. McGuire, director of financial assistance at Boston University. She said changing attitudes about debt were behind the trend.

"We're so comfortable with debt burden now as a society, and the parents already have a significant debt burden of their own, they may not see it as a big deal if students are also taking on large amounts of debt," she said.

Ms. Angelopoulos, Ms. Baldari's mother, said she had consulted with a financial adviser.

"I want to do whatever I can to send her to the college she wants to go to," Ms. Angelopoulos said. The advice? "She told me, the best thing you can do is have money to retire," Ms. Angelopoulos said, to avoid being a burden on her daughter.

Mr. Dillon's father, Thomas J. Dillon, who makes more than $100,000 a year as a vice president at a software company, spoke directly with his four children about their college options. There was no choice really, he said, because paying for all four to go to private institutions could cost more than $600,000, and Mr. Dillon still has tens of thousands of dollars in student debt from his own law school education, which he completed in the 1990's.

"We basically did two things," Mr. Dillon said. "One is we said to them, if you go to the University of Rhode Island, which is a state school, here's what we would pay."

But if any of the children chose to go to another college, as his eldest son did when he chose to go to the University of Connecticut, then their parents would only contribute the dollar amount that they would have paid for in-state public university tuition, he said.

Financial aid officers also say some middle- and upper-middle class families may not have saved enough in part because they thought, incorrectly, that financial aid would compensate. But financial aid calculations focus on assets (other than a home) and past, present and future income, and while such calculations allow for living expenses, the assumed lifestyle may be more austere than what many families have enjoyed or are willing to accept.

"We can't be awarding financial assistance based on discretionary choices" parents have made in spending their money, Ms. McGuire said. "You say that as nicely as you can: I can't give you more money because you have a large consumer debt. I have got to have an analysis that is not rewarding you for discretionary spending."

Concern about the higher interest rates and other burdens of private loans on borrowers has led Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., through the Associated Colleges of the Midwest consortium, to try to negotiate with lenders for better terms for their students, said Rod Oto, director of student financial services and associate dean of admissions at Carleton. "Our thinking was, joining together we might have a little bit more leverage."

To take advantage of growing demand, big banks are expanding their student loan operations. Chase recently bought Collegiate Funding Services, an education finance company based in Fredericksburg, Va., to be able to service student loans directly, sending out collection notices, processing payments and the like.

"We're viewing it as a very important segment for us," said Brad Conner, an executive vice president. "It certainly is one of the fastest growing."

Maggie Walsh, a senior at McIntosh High School in Peachtree City, Ga., said that although her top choice for college this fall was New York University, she was worried about the cost, which could come to more than $30,000 a year for tuition alone, according to N.Y.U.'s Web site. As a Georgia resident, she said, she could take advantage of a state scholarship program that offers full tuition at any public state university to any high school student with a B average.

"I've been thinking about it," Ms. Walsh said. "If I don't get any financial aid from such-and-such a college, is it worth going into years and years of debt? It's starting to look like more and more of a bad idea."

    Some Parents Let Children Choose College, and Pay, NYT, 10.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/10/education/10aid.html?ex=1144900800&en=4a5b6f84e50afd61&ei=5087

Computers may not boost student achievement

Posted 4/11/2006 3:42 AM ET
USA TODAY
By Greg Toppo

SAN FRANCISCO — Give a kid a laptop and it might not make any difference.

That's the message from research presented here Monday, which suggests that spending millions of dollars to bring technology into kids' homes and schools has decidedly mixed results.

Taxpayer-supported school computer and Internet giveaways are political gold, but studies have questioned whether they actually help student achievement. This research, presented at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting, confirms skeptics' doubts.

In one study, researchers from Syracuse and Michigan State universities examined a program that gave laptop computers to middle-school students in Ohio in 2003. Preliminary findings are mixed.

"Overall, we don't know if it is a worthwhile investment," says Syracuse researcher Jing Lei.

About 37% of the children say they stare at the screens for more than three hours a day; a few report more than five hours a day. Parents help kids with homework more often and students' grades benefit slightly, but teachers report more classroom distractions as students check e-mail. And students actually feel distracted: In the first year, their grade-point averages rose modestly, but when Lei and a colleague asked them to estimate their GPAs, students actually believed they dropped.

"They felt that time is not used as effectively as before," she says.

Laptop giveaways are the latest educational fad; five states either have or will soon have them. More than one in eight school districts have some sort of program in which every child gets a PC.

Evidence has shown that computers are finding their way even into the homes and schools of the nation's poorest students. A Tennessee study found that schools serving low-income children had more computers than your typical school — 125 for poor kids' schools vs. 114 elsewhere, and computers in low-income schools often were more connected to the Internet.

But using computers, for instance, to teach reading in primary grades actually showed negative results.

Technology giveaways aren't limited to U.S. schools. Researchers in England studied 80 schools that had received electronic "whiteboards," computerized chalkboards that allow teachers to use special markers for lessons. The $2,000 whiteboards also allow them to save their work to a computer and even surf the Internet with a class. Researchers found that teachers and students like them, but that they have a "very small and short-lived" effect on skills.

But some policymakers seem intent on such programs even before results are in. Steve Higgins of the University of Newcastle says results were not yet compiled before British officials expanded the pilot program nationwide.

    Computers may not boost student achievement, UT, 11.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-04-11-computers-schools_x.htm

For college applicants, stress, confusion reign

Updated 4/10/2006 9:26 PM ET
Special for USA TODAY
By Alvin P. Sanoff

If there is such a thing as the perfect storm in the college admissions process, it hit this year.

Students applied to more and more colleges, and many schools received a record number of applications. At the same time, many high-achieving students zeroed in on the same selective institutions. The result: admissions deans and their staffs made hair-splitting decisions and left many students and high school counselors stunned.

To admissions officials, the process was rational, if excruciating. But to those on the outside, it had all the characteristics of a lottery.

"I feel like throwing up my hands and saying there is no rhyme or reason to the decisions," says Robert Turba, a counselor for 36 years and chairman of guidance services at Stanton College Preparatory School in Jacksonville.

Katherine Woodfield, a straight A student at Northwood High School in Irvine, Calif., says the decisions seem "random."

A leader in community service activities and the student representative on the local school board, she applied to 10 colleges; she was admitted to one Ivy League school, Yale University in New Haven, Conn. But she was wait-listed or rejected at four other Ivies.

"I was surprised I got into Yale, and rejected by schools not quite as difficult to get into," she says. Yale admitted only 8.6% of applicants.

Penn says yes, Duke says no

Julia Sein, first in her class at Stanton College Prep in Jacksonville, applied to 15 colleges. She was accepted to two Ivies, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. But she was rejected by two other Ivies and wait-listed at a third. She also was rejected by Duke University in Durham, N.C.

That particularly surprised her. "Last year Duke admitted eight students from my school, and as the projected valedictorian I thought they would admit me," she says. "I have friends with similar academics to mine who got in to Duke but were rejected by Penn."

Decisions like that seem inexplicable to many applicants. Still, Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at Penn, describes the process "as subjective, but not capricious." He says there is a tendency to believe that students with the highest test scores and grade-point averages are admitted over those with lower numbers. But the process is more complex; each college has different priorities in putting together a freshman class. "What we consider a well-rounded class might be different than it is at Duke," he says.

Jeff Brenzel, dean of admissions at Yale, says applicants need to remember that they are looking at who is admitted from the perspective of their high school or community, but Yale is drawing from a much larger pool of students.

"What may look like a decision pattern that is impossible to understand when you look at a particular group of applicants, looks more rational when you are drawing from a pool of 21,000," he says.

At some schools, including Penn and Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., decision-making was more difficult because they admitted fewer students, the result of enrolling a larger freshman class than expected last fall. "We had to be conservative with our offers, because if more chose us than last year we wouldn't have enough room," says Monica Inzer, Hamilton dean of admission. At Penn, the number admitted was down almost 9%; at Hamilton it was down 5%.

Some counselors say they are less surprised by the decisions at elite schools than at colleges a notch or two below the top.

"Schools where good, solid kids were a sure admit a few years ago, now are places where they find themselves wait-listed or denied," says Amy Belstra, post-graduate counselor at Cherry Creek High School in suburban Denver.

More applications needed?

She cites such institutions as Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., and Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. Both had modest increases in applications this year.

Many counselors worry that high school juniors, seeing what has happened, will enter their senior year feeling the need to apply to more schools than this year's graduating class. James Montague, Jr., director of guidance at Boston Latin School, says the first question he was asked at parents' night this spring was "whether students should apply to 20 to 30 colleges."

The ease of applying online has made that feasible, but most counselors frown on what they consider a scattershot approach.

Deborah Hardy, head of school counseling at Irvington High School near New York City, works with kids to develop a list of about eight schools that would be a good fit. But they add to the list; she finds out only when they ask to have transcripts sent. "They say, 'my neighbor or cousin thought it was a good school for me,' " she says.

With high school graduates expected to increase for the next several years, the admissions frenzy is unlikely to abate anytime soon. "That is our current culture," says Belstra. "I just hope it will change."

_______

RANKINGS MATTER - A LOT

When deciding where to apply to college, high-achieving high school seniors put the highest priority on the academic rigor of an institution and its reputation in their potential major, a survey released Monday says.

The prestige of an institution, the clubs and activities on campus and close contact with faculty also rank high in importance, says the nationwide survey of 600 seniors, all of whom had SAT scores of 1100 and above. It was conducted last spring and released Monday by LipmanHearne, a Chicago-based marketing firm whose clients include colleges and universities.

Among the other highlights:

Students with SAT scores between 1100 and 1290 are more likely than those with higher scores to be career-minded and to want to attend a college close to home.

Students in the Mid-Atlantic states are more likely than their peers in other regions to take into account college rankings like those in U.S. News & World Report when determining where to apply.

When deciding where to enroll, financial aid becomes as important a consideration as academic factors.

Students with SAT scores between 1100 and 1290 are more likely than those with higher scores to rely on parents and conversations with admissions officers in making enrollment decisions. The higher-scoring students are more likely to consult a wider range of sources.

By Alvin P. Sanoff, USA TODAY

    For college applicants, stress, confusion reign, UT, 10.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-04-10-college-admissions_x.htm

Class-Action Lawsuit to Be Filed Over SAT Scoring Errors

April 9, 2006
The New York Times
By KAREN W. ARENSON

Three Minnesota law firms have begun a class-action lawsuit against the College Board and one of its contractors over scoring errors for thousands of students who took the SAT last October.

Papers were served Friday for a suit in state court in Hennepin County, Minn. Officials say it is the first legal action in the matter; a handful of other firms have expressed interest in the case.

The College Board disclosed last month that 4,411 students out of about 500,000 who took the SAT reasoning test in October received incorrect scores. The errors were partly due to moisture that interfered with the scanning of the students' answer sheets by Pearson Educational Measurement, the company that handled that part of the scoring for the College Board. Pearson's parent company, NCS Pearson Inc., is based in Minnesota.

"The College Board contracted with Pearson despite the fact that Pearson is no stranger to botching test scores," the 48-page complaint said.

The board said most of the students received scores that were too low, some by as much as 450 points of a maximum possible 2,400, and those scores were being corrected. It also said that about 600 students received scores that were too high, by as much as 50 points, but that under board policy, those scores were not corrected.

Some college admissions officers have criticized that policy, which the board has said it is reviewing.

Chiarra Coletti, a spokeswoman for the College Board, and David R. Hakensen, a spokesman for Pearson, said yesterday that they could not comment on the suit.

T. Joseph Snodgrass, a partner at Larson King in St. Paul, one of the three firms bringing the suit, said the lead plaintiff was a high school senior from Dix Hills, N.Y., on Long Island, who received an incorrect score when he took the exam. The student was not identified in the suit.

Mr. Snodgrass said yesterday that the firms planned to seek an injunction requiring the College Board to correct the inflated scores as well as those that were too low.

"It is unfair that regular students have to compete against those students with inflated scores for admission, scholarships and financial aid," Mr. Snodgrass said.

The suit defined two classes of students: those who received mistaken scores "and everybody else who has to compete against the students with inflated scores," he said. That may amount to millions of students who applied to college this year, he said.

Robert A. Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, a group that says standardized tests are relied on too heavily, said more than half a dozen other law firms were working on similar suits.

"Our hope is that this lawsuit will finally get to the bottom of what really happened," Mr. Schaeffer said, "and why it took so long for the College Board to make the problem public."

The board has said it was alerted to the problem by two students who questioned the scores they received in December; after finding that their tests were misscored, the board investigated and learned the problem was widespread.

The three law firms — Larson King, and Zimmerman Reed and McSweeney & Fay, both of Minneapolis — joined in another suit against Pearson over a misscored state test in 2000 that kept some students from graduating with their class. In 2002, Pearson settled it for $12 million, with about $7 million for students and $4.5 million in lawyers' fees.

    Class-Action Lawsuit to Be Filed Over SAT Scoring Errors, NYT, 9.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/us/09sat.html

Silence in class

University professors denounced for anti-Americanism; schoolteachers suspended for their politics; students encouraged to report on their tutors. Are US campuses in the grip of a witch-hunt of progressives, or is academic life just too liberal?

Tuesday April 4, 2006
Guardian
By Gary Younge

After the screenwriter Walter Bernstein was placed on the blacklist during the McCarthyite era he said his life "seemed to move in ever-decreasing circles". "Few of my friends dropped away but the list of acquaintances diminished," he wrote in Inside Out, a memoir of the blacklist. "I appeared contaminated and they did not want to risk infection. They avoided me, not calling as they had in the past, not responding to my calls, being nervously distant if we met in public places."

As chair of African American studies in Yale, Paul Gilroy had a similar experience recently after he spoke at a university-sponsored teach-in on the Iraq war. "I think the morality of cluster bombs, of uranium-tipped bombs, [of] daisy cutters are shaped by an imperial double standard that values American lives more," he said. "[The war seems motivated by] a desire to enact revenge for the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon ... [It's important] to speculate about the relation between this war and the geopolitical interests of Israel."

"I thought I was being extremely mealy-mouthed, but I was accused of advocating conspiracy theories," says Gilroy, who is now the Anthony Giddens professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics.

Scot Silverstein, who was once on the faculty at Yale, saw a piece in the student paper about Gilroy's contribution. He wrote to the Wall Street Journal comparing Gilroy to Hitler and claiming his words illustrated the "moral psychosis and perhaps psychological sadism that appears to have infected leftist academia". The Journal published the letter. Gilroy found himself posted on Discoverthenetworks.org, a website dedicated to exposing radical professors. The principle accusation was that he "believes the US fabricated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein".

Then the emails started coming to him and his colleagues, denouncing him. "Only one person said anything," says Gilroy. "Otherwise, nobody looked me in the eye. There was something about the way it never came up that made me realise how nervous and apprehensive they were."

Few would argue there are direct parallels between the current assaults on liberals in academe and McCarthyism. Unlike the McCarthy era, most threats to academic freedom - real or perceived - do not, yet, involve the state. Nor are they buttressed by widespread popular support, as anticommunism was during the 50s. But in other ways, argues Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes - McCarthyism in America, comparisons are apt.

"In some respects it's more dangerous," she says. "McCarthyism dealt mainly with off-campus political activities. Now they focus on what is going on in the classroom. It's very dangerous because it's reaching into the core academic functions of the university, particularly in Middle-Eastern studies."

Either way, a growing number of apparently isolated incidents suggests a mood which is, if nothing else, determined, relentless and aimed openly at progressives in academe.

Earlier this year, Fox news commentator Sean Hannity urged students to record "leftwing propaganda" by professors so he could broadcast it on his show. On the web there is Campus Watch, "monitoring Middle East studies on campus"; Edwatch, "Education for a free nation"; and Parents Against Bad Books in School.

In mid January, the Bruin Alumni association offered students $100 to tape leftwing professors at the University of California Los Angeles. The association effectively had one dedicated member, 24-year-old Republican Andrew Jones. It also had one dedicated aim: "Exposing UCLA's most radical professors" who "[proselytise] their extreme views in the classroom".

Shortly after the $100 offer was made, Jones mounted a website, uclaprofs.com, which compiled the Dirty 30 - a hit list of those he considered the most egregious, leftwing offenders. Top of the list was Peter McLaren, a professor at the UCLA's graduate school of education. Jones branded McLaren a "monster". "Everything that flows from Peter McLaren's mouth and pen is deeply, inextricably radical," wrote Jones. "In keeping with the left's identity politics he has been a friend to the gay community."

McLaren was shocked. "I was away when the story broke and when I came back there were 87 messages waiting for me. I was surprised a list like that could be created in these times. I thought, 'Wow, somebody's out there reading my work fairly carefully.'" The main impact, he says, was to try to insulate those close to him from the fallout. "I had to take down lots of things from my website - family pictures and contacts with other people. I didn't want other people to pay the price."

Also among the Dirty 30 was history professor Ellen DuBois. She was described as, "in every way the modern female academic: militant, impatient, accusatory and radical - very radical". DuBois told the Los Angeles Times, "This is a totally abhorrent invitation to students to participate in a witch hunt against their professors."

McLaren, who describes himself as a marxist-humanist, agrees. He believes the list was a McCarthyite attack on academe, with the aim of softening up public hostility for a more propitious moment: "This is a low-intensity campaign that can be ratcheted up at a time of crisis. When there is another crisis in this country and this country is in an ontological hysteria, an administration could use that to up the ante. I think it represents a tendency towards fascism."

Six weeks after Jones released his list, two Los Angeles county sheriffs arrived unannounced at Professor Miguel Tinker-Salas's office at Pomona College and started asking questions. Tinker-Salas, a Latin American history professor, was born in Venezuela and is a vocal critic of US policy in the region. The sheriffs, part of a federal anti-terrorism task force, told him that he was not the subject of an investigation. Then, for the next 25 minutes they quizzed him on whether he had been influenced in any way by or had contact with the Venezuelan government, on the leadership within the local Venezuelan community, the consulate and the embassy. Then they questioned his students about the content of his classes, examined the cartoons on his door. "They cast the Venezuelan community as a threat," says Tinker-Salas. "I think they were fishing to see if I had any information they could use."

Pomona's president, David Oxtoby, says he was "extremely concerned about the chilling effect this kind of intrusive government interest could have on free scholarly and political discourse."

Last year, some students at the Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University ran a campaign against alleged anti-Israeli bias among professors, criticising the university as a place where pro-Israeli students were intimidated and faculty members were prejudiced. A faculty committee appointed by Columbia concluded that there had been no serious misconduct.

These issues are not confined to university campuses: it is also happening in schools. Since February, the normally sleepy, wealthy district of Upper St Clair in Pennsylvania has been riven with arguments over its curriculum after the local school board banned the International Baccalaureate (IB), the global educational programme, for being an "un-American" marxist and anti-Christian. During their election campaign, the Republicans of Upper St Clair referred to the IB, which is offered in 122 countries and whose student intake has risen by 73% worldwide in the past five years, as though it was part of an international communist conspiracy, suspicious of a curriculum that had been "developed in a foreign country" (Switzerland). "Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values and we have to be careful about what values our children are taught," said one Republican board member. Similar campaigns have also sprung up recently at school boards in Minnesota and Virginia.

Meanwhile, in January in Aurora, Colorado, social studies teacher Jay Bennish answered questions in his world geography class about President George Bush's speech from his students at Overland High School. Caricaturing Bush's speech, Bennish said, "'It's our duty as Americans to use the military to go out into the world and make the world like us.'" He then continued: "Sounds a lot like the things Adolf Hitler used to say: 'We're the only ones who are right, everyone else is backwards and it's our job to conquer the world and make sure they all live just like we want them to.' Now I'm not saying that Bush and Hitler are exactly the same. Obviously they're not, OK? But there are some eerie similarities to the tones they use."

Unbeknown to him, one 16-year-old student, Sean Allen, recorded part of the class on his MP3 player. When his Republican father heard it he was so incensed that he shopped it around to local conservative radio stations, where it finally found a home with radio talk-show host Mike Rosen.

Later in Bennish's class, the teacher had told his students, "I am not in any way implying that you should agree with me. I don't even know if I'm necessarily taking a position. But what I'm trying to get you to do is to think, all right, about these issues more in depth, and not just take things from the surface. And I'm glad you asked all your questions because they're all very good, legitimate questions." Rosen only played the first part of the tape on his programme. He also put it on the internet.

The next day, the Cherry Creek school district suspended Bennish, arguing that he had at least breached a policy requiring teachers to be "as objective as possible and to present fairly the several sides of an issue" when dealing with religious, political, economic or social issues.

The suspension sparked rival demonstrations at school. Hundreds of students staged a walkout, a few wearing duct tape over their mouths while some chanted, "Freedom of speech, let him teach." A smaller demonstration was staged against Bennish, with students writing "Teach don't preach" on their shirts.

But it has primarily been universities that have been on the frontline. And on the other side of the trenches has been the rightwing firebrand David Horowitz. Horowitz, who had Jones on his payroll but fired him after the taping controversy, was raised by communist parents and was himself a marxist as a teenager. He is involved with Campus Watch, Jihad Watch, Professors Watch and Media Watch; he was also connected to discoverthenetworks.org, which targeted Gilroy. A few years ago he founded a group, Students for Academic Freedom, which boasts chapters promoting his agenda on more than 150 campuses. The movement monitors slights or insults that students say they have suffered and provides an online complaint form. Students are advised to write down "the date, class and name of the professor", get witnesses, "accumulate a list of incidents or quotes", and lodge a complaint. Over the past three years Horowitz has led the call for an academic bill of rights in several states. The bills would allow students to opt out of any part of a course they felt was "personally offensive" and force American universities to adopt quotas for conservative professors as well as monitor the political inclinations of their staff.

The bill has been debated in 23 states, including six this year. In July, Pennsylvania approved legislation calling on 14 state-affiliated colleges to free their campuses from the "imposition of ideological orthodoxy". Meanwhile, House Republicans have included a provision in the Higher Education Act which calls on publicly funded colleges to ensure a diversity of ideas in class - code for countering the alleged liberal bias in classrooms.

"The aim of the movement isn't really to achieve legislation," says Horowitz. "It's supposed to act as a cattle prod, to make legislators and universities aware. The ratio of leftwing professors in Berkeley and Stanford is seven to one and nine to one. You can't get hired if you're a conservative in American universities."

Reliable empirical, as opposed to anecdotal, evidence to back up Horowitz's claim of political imbalance is patchy but rarely contested. The most detailed study, conducted by California economist Daniel Klein and Swedish scientist Charlotta Stern, did reveal a significant Democratic bias which varied depending on the course they taught. It showed that 30 times as many anthropologists and sociologists voted Democrat as Republican, while for those teaching economics the ration plummeted to three to one.

But these results gave only a partial account of campus life. Limiting their research to the social sciences and the humanities excluded a substantial portion of the university experience. According to the Princeton Review, four of the top 10 most popular subjects - business administration and management, biology, nursing and computer science - are not in the social sciences or humanities. Republicans are probably more inclined to find a home in some of these disciplines. In any case, most academics do not deny that there is a progressive, liberal bias in academe. "Of course," says Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at the Columbia School of Journalism. "There's a lot of conservatives in oil. But there aren't a lot of conservatives planning on studying sociology."

And while liberals may be more numerous, argues Schrecker, a professor of history at Yeshiva University in New York, that does not necessarily mean they are more powerful. "Progressive academe is like the ninth ward of New Orleans before the levees break - neither secure nor particularly safe. It's one of the few areas left with some kind of progressive culture."

That, rather than protection of free expression on campus, is precisely why it remains a target for the right, they say.

In February, Horowitz published a book, The Professors: the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, in which he lists, in alphabetical order, the radical academics whom he believes are polluting academe with leftwing propaganda. "Coming to a campus near you: terrorists, racists, and communists - you know them as The Professors," reads the blurb on the jacket. "Today's radical academics aren't the exception - they're legion. And far from being harmless, they spew violent anti-Americanism, preach anti-semitism and cheer on the killing of American soldiers and civilians - all the while collecting tax dollars and tuition fees to indoctrinate our children."

The book is a sloppy series of character assassinations, relying more heavily on insinuation, inference, suggestion and association than it does on fact. Take Todd Gitlin, a journalism and sociology professor at Columbia University. Gitlin was the leader of Students for Democratic Society, a radical anti-war movement in the 60s. Today, his politics could be described as mainstream liberal. He supported the war in Afghanistan but not in Iraq and hung out the Stars and Stripes after the terrorist attacks on September 11. He has recently written a book, The Intellectuals and the Flag, calling for progressives to embrace a patriotic culture that distinguishes between allegiance to one's country, which he supports, and loyalty to one's government, which he does not.

None the less, Horowitz slams him for participating in an anti-war teach-in in March 2003 at which his colleague Nicholas de Genova called for "a million Mogadishus" to be visited on American soldiers in Iraq - referring to the murder of US military in Somalia. But Gitlin has never met or spoken to Genova and was not participating in the teach-in when Genova spoke. Horowitz also slates Gitlin for "immersing students in the obscurantist texts of leftists icons like Jürgen Habermas", but omits to mention that Gitlin also teaches from the works of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Adam Smith and the gospels.

"Horowitz's idea of research is cherry-picking," says Gitlin. "And he can't even be trusted to find cherries. He comes up with bitter prunes."

Victor Navasky, the Delacorte professor of journalism at Columbia University, is also on Horowitz's hit list. Navasky, publisher emeritus of the leftwing magazine The Nation and chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, is accused of "bankrolling" the review and denounced for organising lectures by "prominent leftists" such as Michael Tomasky of American Prospect and Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker. Navasky points out that he has also hosted a lecture by Fox news anchor Bill O'Reilly and the editor of the rightwing Weekly Standard at Columbia, and that the only cheque he ever sent the Review was one he returned after the magazine paid him for an article.

"Were it not for all the inaccuracies I would say that I would be flattered to be on the list, but I don't think I earned it," says Navasky. "I don't think anyone seriously considers me a clear and present danger to the republic."

Horowitz accuses those who accuse him of McCarthyism of being McCarthyites themselves. "All they do is tar and feather me with slanders," he says. "It's the politics of Stalinism."

Evidence to back up his central argument - that these political leanings are at all related to a teacher's ability to be fair, balanced or competent in class - are non-existent. Most of the criticisms of lecturers on both the Dirty 30 list and in Horowitz's book are levelled at comments professors have made outside the classroom and rarely do they provide any evidence of the accused actually criticising or ridiculing students with rightwing ideas.

Nobody denies that bad leftwing lecturers exist. As Russell Jacoby argued in The Nation, "Higher education in America is a vast enterprise boasting roughly a million professors. A certain portion of these teachers are incompetents and frauds; some are rabid patriots and fundamentalists - and some are ham-fisted leftists. All should be upbraided if they violate scholarly or teaching norms. At the same time, a certain portion of the 15 million students they teach are fanatics and crusaders." It is not their work as professors Horowitz does not like; it is the ideologies they espouse, whether in or outside the classroom.

Political assaults on intellectuals are not new. Nor are they specific to the US. At the dawn of western civilisation, Socrates was executed for filling "young people's heads with the wrong ideas". Mao targeted professors for particular humiliation during the cultural revolution.

Mark Smith, the director of government relations for the professor's union, the American Association of University Professors, says that these broadsides vary according to the political climate. Shortly after world war one, the litmus test was those who opposed America's participation in the war or backed the fledgling Russian revolution; during the 50s, it was communists; during the 80s, it was leftwing professors in Latin American studies departments. During the early 90s, Lynne Cheney, the wife of the current vice-president, was chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, when she lead the bureaucratic charge against "political correctness". In many humanities faculties, she claimed, the common thinking is that "there is no truth. Everything we think is true is shaped by political interests ... Since there is no truth ... faculty members are perfectly justified in using the classroom to advance political agendas."

"These things go in cycles," says Smith. "Horowitz did not invent this. He's capitalising on an ongoing anti-intellectualism and fear of the other."

Many believe that this current cycle has intensified as a result of the official response to 9/11. Two months after the terrorist attacks, the conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), founded by Lynne Cheney in 1995, branded colleges and universities the "weak link in America's response" to the terrorist attacks and called on lecturers and professors to defend western civilisation. In a report entitled Defending Civilization: how our universities are failing America and what can be done about it, ACTA president Jerry Martin and vice-president Anne D Neal, wrote: "While faculty should be passionately defended in their right to academic freedom, that does not exempt them from criticism. The fact is: academe is the only section of American society that is distinctly divided in its response to the attacks on America."

Regardless of their accuracy, integrity and provenance, some believe that these assaults do have an effect. "There is a cunning behind the battyness," says Gitlin. "It's not just the self-aggrandisement. It's an assault on one of the few social enclaves that the right doesn't control. There is a scattershot bellicosity whether the fortunes of the political right are up or down. They find it useful for fundraising if nothing else."

Others argue that while the individual accounts are troubling, their ultimate effect on academe can be exaggerated. The response to the recent article in the London Review of Books by two prominent American professors arguing that the pro-Israel lobby exerts a dominant and damaging influence on US foreign policy may be a case in point. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have been accused of being anti-semites and bigots, prompting accusations of a McCarthyite witch-hunt. Shortly after publication, it was announced that one of the authors, Walt, was stepping down from his job as academic dean at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the school removed the piece from the front page of its website. But the Kennedy School and Walt's colleagues said that the move had long been planned. Meanwhile, the school explained the website change thus: "The only purpose of that removal was to end public confusion; it was not intended, contrary to some interpretations, to send any signal that the school was also 'distancing' itself from one of its senior professors."

"The University of Chicago and Harvard University have behaved admirably in difficult circumstances. We have had the full support of our respective institutions," Mearsheimer said. So all that is left are the accusations which, given the nature of the original article, not even the authors say surprised them. People have a right to be offended. It is when that offence is either based on flawed information or mobilised into an institutional or legislative clampdown that accusations of a witch-hunt truly come into play.

"Clearly these things are disturbing," says Jon Wiener, professor of history at UCLA. "But I don't think they are happening because students are demanding it. The Bruin Alumni Association [turned out] to be one ambitious, well-funded guy. There are some frightening moments, but then things seem to return to normal."

"It's not even clear this is much other than the ill-considered action of a handful, if that, of individuals," says DuBois.

But however many people are involved, the attacks do make a difference, claims Gilroy. "Of course it has an effect," he says. "There's a pre-written script you have to follow and if you chose not to follow it, then there are consequences, so you become very self-conscious about what you say. To call it self-censorship is much too crude. But everybody is looking over their shoulder".

    Silence in class, G, 4.4.2006, http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,1746473,00.html

Invoking Federal Law, Maryland Takes Over Baltimore Schools

March 29, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

BALTIMORE, March 29 — Invoking the federal No Child Left Behind Law, the Maryland State school board voted today to take control of four Baltimore high schools with chronically low achievement and strip the city of Baltimore from direct operation of seven more middle schools.

In approving the request of state Superintendent of Schools Nancy S. Grasmick, a longtime supporter of the school standard movement, the board took the most drastic remedy provided for under No Child Left Behind, one reserved for schools that have failed to show sufficient progress for at least six years.

It was the first time that a state had moved to take over schools under the federal law, according to local officials.

The state and city have long wrangled over Baltimore's troubled school system, which has been plagued by poor test scores and deteriorating buildings. The high schools slated for takeover here, one of which had only 10 percent of its students pass the state standardized exam in math, had failed to show improvement for over nine years, said Ron Peiffer, an adviser to Dr. Grasmick. That is longer than President Bush's signature education law has even been in existence.

In addition to the high schools, another seven middle schools will also be taken away from the direct operation of the Baltimore city school distric, and will be reopened as charter schools or taken over by nonprofit or private companies. However, they will remain under city supervision.

City officials and community leaders reacted furiously to the move, accusing the school chief of bad faith and of playing politics with the schoolchildren. "This is unprecedented," said Mayor Martin O'Malley. "No other state superintendent in the history of the country has ever tried to do what Dr. Grasmick is trying to do in this election year."

The issue is particularly highly charged in this political year, pitting Gov. Robert Ehrlich, a Republican, against Mr. O'Malley, who is seeking the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

Maryland is doing something that other states have so far taken pains to avoid, and its experience will be watched closely by other states, many of which will likely face the same tough decisions in responding to failing schools as the law's testing regime expands in the coming years.

While Maryland schools are generally not considered worse than other states, and Baltimore is roughly on a par with many other struggling urban systems, the use of standardized tests here have been going on since well before No Child Left Behind became law in 2002.

"Not too many states came into No Child Left Behind with as many schools involved in intervention as Maryland did," said Mr. Peiffer. As states build longer records of testing with each year of the law, he predicted, "they are going to have similar discussions about alternative governance."

    Invoking Federal Law, Maryland Takes Over Baltimore Schools, NYT, 29.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/national/29cnd-child.html

Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math

March 26, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

SACRAMENTO — Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.

Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.

The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.

The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.

The survey, by the Center on Education Policy, found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math. The center is an independent group that has made a thorough study of the new act and has published a detailed yearly report on the implementation of the law in dozens of districts.

"Narrowing the curriculum has clearly become a nationwide pattern," said Jack Jennings, the president of the center, which is based in Washington.

At Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High School in Sacramento, about 150 of the school's 885 students spend five of their six class periods on math, reading and gym, leaving only one 55-minute period for all other subjects.

About 125 of the school's lowest-performing students are barred from taking anything except math, reading and gym, a measure that Samuel Harris, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army who is the school's principal, said was draconian but necessary. "When you look at a kid and you know he can't read, that's a tough call you've got to make," Mr. Harris said.

The increasing focus on two basic subjects has divided the nation's educational establishment. Some authorities, including Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, say the federal law's focus on basic skills is raising achievement in thousands of low-performing schools. Other experts warn that by reducing the academic menu to steak and potatoes, schools risk giving bored teenagers the message that school means repetition and drilling.

"Only two subjects? What a sadness," said Thomas Sobol, an education professor at Columbia Teachers College and a former New York State education commissioner. "That's like a violin student who's only permitted to play scales, nothing else, day after day, scales, scales, scales. They'd lose their zest for music."

But officials in Cuero, Tex., have adopted an intensive approach and said it was helping them meet the federal requirements. They have doubled the time that all sixth graders and some seventh and eighth graders devote to reading and math, and have reduced it for other subjects.

"When you only have so many hours per day and you're behind in some area that's being hammered on, you have to work on that," said Henry Lind, the schools superintendent. "It's like basketball. If you can't make layups, then you've got to work on layups."

Chad Colby, a spokesman for the federal Department of Education, said the department neither endorsed nor criticized schools that concentrated instructional time on math and reading as they sought to meet the test benchmarks laid out in the federal law's accountability system, known as adequate yearly progress.

"We don't choose the curriculum," Mr. Colby said. "That's a decision that local leaders have to make. But for every school you point to, I can show you five other schools across the country where students are still taking a well-rounded curriculum and are still making adequate yearly progress. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask our schools to get kids proficient at grade level in reading and math."

Since America's public schools began taking shape in the early 1800's, shifting fashions have repeatedly reworked the curriculum. Courses like woodworking and sewing joined the three R's. After World War I, vocational courses, languages and other subjects broadened the instructional menu into a smorgasbord.

A federal law passed after the Russian launching of Sputnik in 1957 spurred a renewed emphasis on science and math, and a 1975 law that guaranteed educational rights for the disabled also provoked sweeping change, said William Reese, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of "America's Public Schools: From the Common School to No Child Left Behind." But the education law has leveraged one of the most abrupt instructional shifts, he said.

"Because of its emphasis on testing and accountability in particular subjects, it apparently forces some school districts down narrow intellectual paths," Dr. Reese said. "If a subject is not tested, why teach it?"

The shift has been felt in the labor market, heightening demand for math teachers and forcing educators in subjects like art and foreign languages to search longer for work, leaders of teachers groups said.

The survey coming out this week looks at 299 school districts in 50 states. It was conducted as part of a four-year study of No Child Left Behind and appears to be the most systematic effort to track the law's footprints through the classroom, although other authorities had warned of its effect on teaching practices.

The historian David McCullough told a Senate Committee last June that because of the law, "history is being put on the back burner or taken off the stove altogether in many or most schools, in favor of math and reading."

The report says that at districts in Colorado, Texas, Vermont, California, Nebraska and elsewhere, math and reading are squeezing other subjects. At one district cited, the Bayonne City Schools in New Jersey, low-performing ninth graders will be barred from taking Spanish, music or any other elective next fall so they can take extra periods of math and reading, said Ellen O'Connor, an assistant superintendent.

"We're using that as a motivation," Dr. O'Connor said. "We're hoping they'll concentrate on their math and reading so they can again participate in some course they love."

At King Junior High, in a poor neighborhood in Sacramento a few miles from a decommissioned Air Force base, the intensive reading and math classes have raised test scores for several years running. That has helped Larry Buchanan, the superintendent of the Grant Joint Union High School District, which oversees the school, to be selected by an administrators' group as California's 2005 superintendent of the year.

But in spite of the progress, the school's scores on California state exams, used for compliance with the federal law, are increasing not nearly fast enough to allow the school to keep up with the rising test benchmarks. On the math exams administered last spring, for instance, 17.4 percent of students scored at the proficient level or above, and on the reading exams, only 14.9 percent.

With scores still so low, Mr. Harris, the school's principal, and Mr. Buchanan said they had little alternative but to continue remedial instruction for the lower-achieving among the school's nearly 900 students.

The students are the sons and daughters of mostly Hispanic, black and Laotian Hmong parents, many of whom work as gardeners, welders and hotel maids or are unemployed. The district administers frequent diagnostic tests so that teachers can carefully calibrate lessons to students' needs.

Rubén Jimenez, a seventh grader whose father is a construction laborer, has a schedule typical of many students at the school, with six class periods a day, not counting lunch.

Rubén studies English for the first three periods, and pre-algebra and math during the fourth and fifth. His sixth period is gym. How does he enjoy taking only reading and math, a recent visitor asked.

"I don't like history or science anyway," Rubén said. But a moment later, perhaps recalling something exciting he had heard about lab science, he sounded ambivalent.

"It'd be fun to dissect something," he said.

Martín Lara, Rubén's teacher, said the intense focus on math was paying off because his math skills were solidifying. Rubén said math had become his favorite subject.

But other students, like Paris Smith, an eighth grader, were less enthusiastic. Last semester, Paris failed one of the two math classes he takes, back to back, each morning.

"I hate having two math classes in a row," Paris said. "Two hours of math is too much. I can't concentrate that long."

Donna Simmons, his mother, said Mr. Lara seemed to be working hard to help Paris understand math.

"The school cares," Ms. Simmons said. "The faculty cares. I want him to keep trying."

Sydney Smith, a vice principal who oversees instruction at the school, said she had heard only minimal grumbling from students excluded from electives.

"I've only had about two students come to my office and say: 'What in the world? I'm just taking two courses?' " Ms. Smith said. "So most students are not complaining about being miserable."

But Lorie Turner, who teaches English to some pupils for three consecutive periods and to others for two periods each day, said she used some students' frustration to persuade them to try for higher scores on the annual exams administered under California's Standardized Testing and Reporting program, known as Star.

"I have some little girls who are dying to get out of this class and get into a mainstream class," Ms. Turner said. "But I tell them the only way out is to do better on that Star test."

    Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math, NYT, 26.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/education/26child.html?hp&ex=1143435600&en=4d3ce0e0048ee9c7&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Judges Once Again Order More Money for City Schools

March 24, 2006
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

An appeals court ruled yesterday that New York City schools were being shortchanged by at least $4.7 billion annually in state aid, adding more firepower to the city's plea for more education money as lawmakers try to wrap up work on a state budget.

But in its ruling, the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court said that only the governor and the Legislature, not the courts, could determine the exact amount of education aid.

The ruling is the latest twist in a more-than-decade-long court battle over state aid for New York City schools. More than two years ago, the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, ruled that students in New York City were being denied a sound basic education and ordered the Legislature and the governor to address the problem. They did not.

In its 3 to 2 decision, the Appellate Division ordered the Legislature to consider a plan to direct between $4.7 billion and $5.63 billion to New York City schools — more than either the governor, the Senate or the Assembly have put forward in their plans.

"This directive does not merely urge the governor and the Legislature to consider taking action," Justice John T. Buckley wrote in the majority decision. "They are directed to take action. The matter for them to consider is whether $4.7 billion, or $5.63 billion, or some amount in between, is the minimum additional annual funding to be appropriated for the city schools."

In an indication of how complicated the ruling was, all sides in the fight declared victory yesterday, yet none ruled out the possibility of taking the ruling back to court. Both the Legislature and Gov. George E. Pataki have avoided dealing with court decisions in the past as the school-financing case wound its way through the courts.

While the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the decision should finally end the case, there were few signs that it would release the logjam in Albany as lawmakers try to pass a budget by the end of the month. Both Governor Pataki and Joseph L. Bruno, the leader of the Republican-controlled Senate, issued statements yesterday saying that their current budget proposals would comply with the court's decision — an assertion the plaintiffs dispute.

"At the present time, our energies and attention are focused on enacting an on-time budget that provides record funding to New York City schools and other high-needs districts across the state so that every child has the opportunity to obtain a quality education," Mr. Pataki said in a statement.

Michael A. Rebell, a lawyer for the plaintiff said that while lawmakers in Albany have dragged their feet for years, he expects the Legislature to make major changes in the budget plans within the next week to address the court ruling.

"We are assuming that we are finally going to get real action," Mr. Rebell said. "This is not carte blanche for the Legislature to do whatever it wants. It is an order to come up with a solution now, right now."

The court also upheld an earlier ruling to provide about $9.2 billion in capital funds over the next five years — even more than the $6.5 billion Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has been seeking.

The court did not offer any direction on how much of the increased school aid should be paid by the state, and how much by the city. That has been a particularly sticky issue between Albany and Mr. Bloomberg.

In 2004, Mr. Pataki proposed a plan to increase the financing for city schools by $4.7 billion, which would have been phased in over five years. But that plan would have required the city to provide $1.5 billion.

The two justices who dissented held that it was not enough for the court to provide a range of options, because, they said, the Legislature might do nothing without an exact directive.

Shortly after the court's decision was made public, Mr. Bruno and the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, sparred over its meaning while standing shoulder to shoulder after a budget hearing.

"This decision gives the Legislature directive that they better address this issue this year," said Mr. Silver, a Democrat who has been pushing for more school spending. "It's directly in the decision."

Mr. Bruno, chiming in, called it "a clear victory that the legislative process is what will dictate school aid in this state."

Mr. Silver, shuffling through pages of the decision, began to quote: "We hold that the state, in enacting a budget for the fiscal year commencing April 1, 2006, must appropriate the constitutionally required funding for the New York City schools."

"Which is how much?" Mr. Bruno asked.

"Well, l, they give you a range," Mr. Silver replied.

"But how do you determine that?" Mr. Bruno asked.

"They give you a range, somewhere between ——" Mr. Silver persisted.

"Who determines it?" Mr. Bruno repeated. "The Legislature."

"No, they, yeah, but they give you the parameters," Mr. Silver said. "Then they talk about ——"

"To consider it, I believe ——" Mr. Bruno said.

"Lawyers will lawyer," Mr. Bruno, who is not a lawyer, added, "and you will have 40 different opinions if there's 40 lawyers giving us the interpretations, that's my feeling."

Danny Hakim contributed reporting for this article.

    Judges Once Again Order More Money for City Schools, NYT, 24.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/nyregion/24cfe.html

SAT Problems Even Larger Than Reported

March 23, 2006
The New York Times
By KAREN W. ARENSON

The College Board disclosed yesterday that the problems resulting from the misscoring of its October SAT examination were larger than it had previously reported.

In a statement, the organization said it discovered last weekend that 27,000 of the 495,000 October tests had not been rechecked for errors. It said that after checking those exams and one other overlooked set, it had found that 400 more students than previously reported had received scores that were too low.

A board official added that the maximum error was 450 points, not 400.

This is the third time in two weeks that the board, which administers the exam, has acknowledged that its earlier assessment of the problems was wrong. In its statement, the board also outlined steps it planned to avoid mistakes.

The disclosures prompted fresh criticism that the board had not been as forthcoming as it should have been in disclosing the problems promptly and in detail.

"Everybody appears to be telling half-truths, and that erodes confidence in the College Board," said Bruce J. Poch, vice president and dean of admissions at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. "It looks like they hired the people who used to do the books for Enron. My next question is what other surprise we're going to hear about next."

The board said two weeks ago that it had found scoring problems on the October SAT after two students requested in December that their tests be re-scored by hand. In the review, the board became aware of a more widespread problem.

It asked Pearson Educational Measurement, the large testing company that scores the exam, to rescore the October exams. As a result, the board found that 4,000 students had received understated scores and that 600 had overstated scores. The policy of the board is to change just scores that are too low. Pearson has said the errors resulted in part from too much moisture when it scanned the answer sheets to be graded by machine.

Last week, the board said 1,600 exams, separated for special processing because of security and other questions, had not been rescored. The board asked Pearson to rescore those tests. While awaiting that rescoring, the board asked Pearson to confirm again that all the October tests had been scored a second time. It turned out that they had not been.

Last weekend, the board said, Pearson informed board officials that 27,000 tests had not been "fully evaluated." Neither the board nor Pearson explained how or why those tests had been overlooked.

In rescoring the 27,000 tests this week, 375 were found to have scores lower than they should have been. The incidence of problems — 1.4 percent of the 27,000 — was significantly higher than in the first batch of problems, in which eight-tenths of 1 percent of the tests were misscored. An additional 18 misscored tests were found among the 1,600 separated from the rest of the October exams for special processing.

According to the board statement yesterday, the total number of students who received scores too low was 10 percent larger than it had reported before, approximately 4,400 rather than 4,000. The board said yesterday that 613 others had received scores higher than those they had earned on the three-part exam, which has a possible 2,400 points.

The vice president for public affairs at the board, Chiarra Coletti, said it would notify college admissions officers and high school guidance counselors last night through an "e-mail alert," and inform affected students today.

Pearson, one of the biggest players in the testing industry, has experienced other scoring problems. It started scoring the SAT last year.

In its statement yesterday, the board said Pearson would ensure that all answer sheets were "acclimatized before scanning" and would scan each answer sheet twice. Pearson will also improve its software to detect whether answer sheets have expanded because of humidity.

In addition, the board said Booz Allen Hamilton, the consultants, would conduct a "comprehensive review, with emphasis on the scanning process," over the next 90 days, and would recommend improvements.

Ms. Coletti said that she did not know how much the new procedures would cost, but that the test fee for the rest of this year would "certainly remain the same."

The board statement quoted Douglas Kubach, chief executive of Pearson Educational Measurement, as saying that the company regretted "the uncertainty and disruption these issues caused" and was "determined to take every possible necessary step to restore confidence in this process."

"Electronic scanning of answers is essential to giving the large number of students who take the SAT the speed and accuracy they require in this important test," he added.

A spokesman for Pearson, David Hakensen, said he could not provide more information on whether the new steps would mean higher prices.

Robert A. Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, a group that criticizes heavy reliance on testing, said the new announcement reinforced "the need for an outside independent investigation to find out how many more problems have not been reported."

"The College Board and Pearson are clearly not competent to police themselves," Mr. Schaeffer said.

    SAT Problems Even Larger Than Reported, NYT, 23.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/education/23sat.html

In New Twist on College Search, a First Choice, and 20 Backups

March 21, 2006
The New York Times
By ALAN FINDER

Michael Martin has done well in the college admissions sweepstakes, having been accepted by eight universities and rejected by one.

But he expects to hear from 12 more colleges in the next few weeks, including Georgetown, Wake Forest and the University of California, Los Angeles. Worried about the increasingly competitive race to get into the nation's top universities, Mr. Martin decided he needed to apply to as many colleges as he could, 21 in all. "Compared to my dad's day and my grandfather's day, it's much harder to get into college," said Mr. Martin, 18, a senior at St. Margaret's Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. "I just think I needed to get my name out to many schools."

His strategy is no longer that unusual. A generation ago, high school seniors applied to three, four or five colleges. But now students aiming for the most selective universities frequently apply to as many as 10 or 12; a significant number of students, especially in the last three years or so, apply to many, many more, guidance counselors and college admissions officials said.

The main reason for this, guidance counselors and admissions officials say, is a growing anxiety about admissions, stoked by college ranking guides, the news media and, often, parents. Some students are desperate to do anything to get into a brand-name institution — including applying to many of them.

The growth of the common application, which more than 270 colleges accept, has contributed as well by making it easier to apply to a large number of institutions; so has an increase in the number of colleges that waive fees for online applications. Most schools charge about $50 to $75 per application. And some students cast a wide net to increase their chances of snaring a substantial merit scholarship.

At Millburn High School, a public school in an affluent northern New Jersey suburb, students routinely apply to 12 to 15 universities. "We have a high here of probably 30, and we have a solid 10 percent who have applied to at least 20," said Nancy Siegel, Millburn's head counselor and coordinator.

Julia Sein, a senior at a magnet high school in Jacksonville, Fla., planned to apply this year to 21 colleges, before winnowing her list to 15. Neeta Kannan, who graduated from a Pittsburgh private school last year, applied to 22 colleges. Rahel Birru, who graduated from the same school a year earlier, applied to 23 (and was accepted by every one).

At New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill., another affluent suburban public school, about 15 to 20 seniors apply to as many as 20 colleges each year.

An annual survey of college freshmen indicates that students bound for all kinds of institutions are filing more applications these days. In 1967, only 1.8 percent of freshman surveyed had applied to seven or more colleges, while in 2005, 17.4 percent had done so, according to the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at U.C.L.A., which conducts the survey. The survey began asking recently if the students had applied to 12 or more colleges; that proportion increased by 50 percent from 2001 to 2005.

"Anecdotally, I know that many students do this almost as if a game, to see how many letters of acceptance they receive," said Andy Morris, associate director of admissions for the State University of New York at Binghamton.

But many others are deadly serious, convinced that they must apply to myriad colleges to be assured of admission to at least one. Sometimes they apply to a vast range of colleges and sometimes to a dozen or more that are essentially the same.

"They are just so nervous that they won't get in anywhere that they just keep coming in with applications," said Stephanie Lapasota, guidance director at the Farmingdale school district on Long Island.

"It's not good for the kids," Ms. Lapasota added. "It's feeding an anxiety."

Ms. Lapasota said the top students at Farmingdale apply to 8 to 12 colleges. "Every year we have a student who applies to 23," she said. Last year, a senior applied to 28.

"We have kind of a counselor's pool each year as to who can get the right number," Ms. Lapasota said.

Instead of taking a scattershot approach to applications, guidance counselors said students should concentrate on researching which colleges were a good fit for them, and not wait to make the hard choice until they have won admission to multiple institutions.

Guidance counselors at public high schools said it would be difficult to limit applications. "I could never justify a limit," Ms. Lapasota said, "but we try to talk to them and get them to be reasonable."

Some private schools are already limiting how many colleges students may apply to. The Sidwell Friends School in Washington, for example, allows up to nine applications. St. Margaret's Episcopal School in Southern California plans to impose a limit of 10 next year, after having some students apply to 25 or more. Schools typically provide transcripts and letters of recommendation among other information.

At The Ellis School, a private girls' school in Pittsburgh, a new policy permits students to apply to 10 schools, with a $35 fee for every application exceeding 10. Joanna Schultz, the school's director of college counseling, said she had reluctantly agreed to the fee because it was usually unnecessary to apply to 15 or 20 schools.

"You can apply to all of the Ivy League schools, and more often than not our students either get into all of them or none," Ms. Schultz said.

While the increase in applications per student has helped swell the number of applications at many colleges — a trend they like to trumpet — even some admissions officials would not be disappointed if more high schools imposed limits. They said it was not good for students to be offered admission to a dozen or more colleges and then have only a few weeks in April to make a choice.

Sometimes a student has good reasons for applying to many colleges. Ms. Kannan, who went to the Ellis School, applied to 22 last year because she wanted to go to medical school and considered programs that combined undergraduate and medical educations, as well as traditional undergraduate colleges.

Ms. Kannan, now a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh in an eight-year program that includes medical school, said she was accepted to 14 or 15 universities, including Harvard and Brown. But she is confident she made the right choice. "I just like the thought of having a guaranteed med school as well," she said.

Ms. Birru, who graduated two years ago, hopes to go to medical school and to earn a doctorate. She said she applied to 23 colleges — among them, Wellesley, Colgate, Carnegie Mellon, Dickinson and Lafayette — to see which would offer her the largest merit, or non-need based, scholarship. She selected the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which admitted her to a scholarship program that promotes research careers in the sciences, especially for members of minorities.

Mr. Martin, the senior in Southern California, is hoping his broad strategy produces similar results.

"I kind of did it shotgun — different campuses, different places, all across the country," said Mr. Martin, who said he hoped to become a wildlife veterinarian.

He was asked what he would do if 15 or 20 colleges offered him admission.

"That," Mr. Martin said, "would be a great problem to have."

    In New Twist on College Search, a First Choice, and 20 Backups, NYT, 21.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/education/21apply.html?hp&ex=1142917200&en=3468c6812a173259&ei=5094&partner=homepage

1,600 SAT Tests Escaped Check for Scoring Errors

March 14, 2006
The New York Times
By KAREN W. ARENSON

The College Board disclosed a new problem yesterday in its efforts to assess and correct mistakes in the scoring of its October SAT test: an overlooked batch of 1,600 exams that have not been checked for errors.

The admission that there were still unchecked tests came a week after the board began notifying colleges that it was raising the SAT scores of 4,000 students whose tests had been graded incorrectly because of processing problems at a Texas scanning facility.

The revelation meant that colleges were likely to face a second scramble to reassess additional applicants just as the admissions season was drawing to a close.

Chiara Coletti, the College Board's vice president for public affairs, said the 1,600 exams had been separated for "special processing" for a variety of reasons, including security. Ms. Coletti said she could not say how many would show scoring errors, though she acknowledged some might.

Tests are sometimes pulled for special processing when students' scores are so different from those they earned on previous exams that they raise questions about whether two different people may have taken the tests, pretending to be the same person.

The 1,600 tests were in the custody of the Educational Testing Service, which once handled most test scoring for the College Board but now handles more limited functions, including test development and security.

Raymond Nicosia, executive director of the testing service's office of testing integrity, said last night that employees of the College Board were aware that the 1,600 tests had not been rescored. Mr. Nicosia said they would be sent for re-examination Tuesday.

Hours before Ms. Coletti reported the new problem, Gaston Caperton, the College Board's president, said in his first interview since the SAT errors were disclosed that he regretted what had occurred but that the College Board needed no outside audits and that Pearson Educational Measurement, the contractor that scores the tests, was making needed changes.

"We are very sorry it happened," Mr. Caperton said. "We've looked back over all of this and we would not have done anything different. We moved as fast as we could and as professionally as we could."

Ms. Coletti said last night that Mr. Caperton had not learned about the 1,600 additional exams until the afternoon, and that he stood by the comments he made in the morning interview.

But with colleges scrambling and angry students saying that their erroneous scores steered them away from applying to certain colleges, critics said an outside investigation of the episode was needed.

"The more we learn, the worse the problems are," said Robert A. Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, which says there is overreliance on standardized testing. "There needs to be an outside investigation to identify everything that went wrong, why, and whether it has been fixed."

Kenneth P. LaValle, a New York state senator from Long Island who is chairman of the Senate's higher-education committee, said he wanted to study whether tighter regulation of testing was warranted and planned to call in officials of the College Board for questioning.

Mr. LaValle was the architect of New York's 1979 truth-in-testing legislation, which helped require agencies like the College Board to release test questions, test answers and the students' own answers for a fee.

The complaints of two students who took advantage of that option were what led to the College Board's discovery of wider problems with the October test.

In an hourlong interview in his orderly fourth-floor office near Lincoln Center, Mr. Caperton and a senior official for operations, Laurence E. Bunin, elaborated on how they then became aware of, and tried to resolve, the broader problems, which in the case of some students resulted in underscoring by as many as 400 points.

Mr. Caperton said that although the requests by two students for hand-scoring of their exams arrived in late December, it was not until Jan. 31 that the hand-scoring took place and the board realized that errors needed to be investigated.

Mr. Bunin said the board had worked as fast as it could, including on nights and weekends, to assess and correct the errors. He said that in early February the board notified Pearson Educational Measurement that there were problems. Pearson has said that damp test papers led to some of the problems.

"We reported them as promptly as humanly possible," Mr. Bunin said.

He said that while big swings in scores would raise red flags about possible cheating, there had not been an unusual number of problems to catch anyone's attention. He said that the number of misscored tests was still small compared with the total number, 495,000.

"When you're talking about a dozen things among half a million, that's not very much," Mr. Bunin said.

Mr. Caperton and Mr. Bunin said yesterday that besides the 4,000 students whose scores had been understated, 600 students had scores that had been overstated, but they could not say by how much. The board's policy is not to reduce scores, an approach that has riled some colleges. The board is reviewing the policy.

Mr. Caperton's assurances that the board was doing what it could were small consolation to students like Amanda Hecker, one of the 4,000 who learned that their initial scores were lower than they should have been.

A senior at Freehold Township High School in New Jersey, Ms. Hecker took the SAT exams last March. She did well, but hoped to do even better, so she took the exam again in October.

Although most students get higher scores when they retest, she did not: the scores on all three parts of her test fell, and her total plunged 180 points, to 1,890 out of a possible 2,400. The normally upbeat student slashed Harvard and Yale off her list of college applications.

"The College Board's analysis shows that it is a one-time anomaly and blames it on the rain," she said. "Should America now be quick to trust this organization that has such a clutch on the college admissions process and college-bound students' emotions?"

In an era when families are paying thousands of dollars to raise their children's scores by 50 or 100 points, some students said they had lost the chance of a lifetime when they made their decisions last fall on where to apply to school.

"I didn't apply to certain schools and I almost didn't apply to others," said Amanda M. Hellerman, a senior at Yorktown High School. Her scores rose more than 300 points once they were corrected; she had chosen not to apply to Brown because of the mistakes.

"I tried to not let it get to me," Ms. Hellerman said, "but to an extent, I did wonder why my performance had declined."

Even now that she knows her scores should have been 320 points higher — with 740's in both reading and writing and a 610 on math — she said she did not think "too fondly" about testing, and wondered "how accurately it gauges your intelligence."

But she had one other pleasant surprise last week: Franklin & Marshall, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, said that her higher scores meant that she qualified for a $12,500 scholarship. Ms. Hellerman said she was thinking seriously about the college.

    1,600 SAT Tests Escaped Check for Scoring Errors, NYT, 14.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/education/14sat.html

Company's Errors on SAT Scores Raise New Qualms About Testing

March 10, 2006
The New York Times
By KAREN W. ARENSON and DIANA B. HENRIQUES

The scoring errors disclosed this week on thousands of the College Board's SAT tests were made by a company that is one of the largest players in the exploding standardized testing business, handling millions of tests each year.

The mistakes, which the company, Pearson Educational Measurement, acknowledged yesterday, raised fresh questions about the reliability of the kinds of high-stakes tests that increasingly dominate education at all levels. Neither Pearson, which handles state testing across the country, nor the College Board detected the scoring problems until two students came forward with complaints.

"The story here is not that they made a mistake in the scanning and scoring but that they seem to have no fail-safe to alert them directly and immediately of a mistake," said Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "To depend on test-takers who challenge the scores to learn about system failure is not good."

These were not the first major scoring problems that Pearson has experienced. The company agreed in 2002 to settle a large lawsuit over errors in scoring 8,000 tests in Minnesota that prevented several hundred high school seniors from graduating. It also has made significant scoring errors in Washington and Virginia.

After those problems, company officials had assured clients that they had vastly improved their quality control. But the new problems on the October SAT turned out to be the most significant scoring errors that the College Board had experienced.

Pearson said yesterday that the SAT errors, which affected 4,000 students out of 495,000 who took the October test, arose partly because of excessive moisture that caused the answer sheets to expand before they were scanned at the company's large test-processing site in Austin, Tex.

Another factor, the company said, was that its scanners did not pick up some lightly marked answers.

The company said in a statement that it was taking steps to make sure that "this unfortunate situation will not happen again."

Chiara Coletti, the College Board's vice president for public affairs, said yesterday that the College Board has continuing confidence in Pearson.

"Pearson says they now understand the technical issues fully, and we know they can control for those issues now," she said. "We are confident of that because our operations people have been talking to their operations people steadily."

The College Board has said that most of the students affected had higher scores than were reported to colleges. The scores were off by as many as 400 points out of a possible 2,400 on the three-part exam covering mathematics, reading and writing, although most errors were smaller.

Pearson said yesterday that it had examined the scoring of all the subsequent SAT's, which were administered in November, December and January, and found no further problems.

But some critics were not reassured. Shawn Raider, the lawyer who represented the Minnesota families who successfully sued Pearson, questioned whether the company had made good on its promise to improve its procedures.

"They certainly said in the course of our lawsuit that they not only were going to, but already had, implemented new quality control measures," he said.

The Pearson testing unit, a subsidiary of Pearson PLC, the giant publishing company that also owns The Financial Times, was awarded the contract for scanning the SAT answer sheets in 2003, taking over some functions previously performed for the College Board by the Educational Testing Service. They began the work last year.

It was one of many contracts that have helped make Pearson a giant in a field that has grown enormously since President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Law in 2002, spurring demand for state testing.

For 20 years, Pearson has worked on the Texas testing program that was the template for Mr. Bush's national testing initiative.

Nationally, the company scored more than 300 million pages of answers last year and about 40 million individual tests.

Even as the company explained what went wrong yesterday, new complaints emerged from students and educators who questioned how they could continue to have confidence in the nation's testing apparatus.

Joe Giglio, director of admission at St. Peter's College in Jersey City, said, "It seems that there is a need for some sort of outside auditing of their processes to insure the integrity of the testing from this point forward."

Philip Benoit, a spokesman for Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., said yesterday that at least one applicant whose SAT score was revised upward by more than 100 points, now qualified for the school's merit-based Marshall Scholarship of $12,500.

Beatrice Bradley, a senior at the Williams School in Connecticut, who discovered that her reported score on the writing section of the SAT exam should have been 700 instead of 690, said one of her friends had also had an Advanced Placement score increased last year after raising questions about it.

"You have to wonder how many things go unchecked," she said.

The SAT errors, which the College Board started to investigate only after two students questioned the scores they received in late December, were not unprecedented.

As testing expanded sharply in the last decade, many more errors have occurred and almost all of them have been detected by students, parents or school officials challenging the accuracy of scores. Pearson said yesterday that it did not learn of the SAT problems until early February.

Some testing industry executives acknowledged yesterday that the SAT errors will add to the pressures the industry is already facing.

"There's no question that the testing industry is challenged," said Stuart R. Kahl, president and chief executive of Measured Progress, a nonprofit testing publisher in Dover, N.H., which provides testing services to 24 states. "But with the growth in business, most companies are implementing systems to make this job doable, so I don't get a sense that there is likely to be an exponential growth in errors."

But Mr. Kahl said that standardized tests at all educational levels are constantly being revised. "The SAT's have been undergoing a lot of changes," he said yesterday. "And when you're putting out new forms of tests every year, the challenges are tremendous."

Some testing critics, like FairTest, a nonprofit organization that opposes most uses of standardized testing, also raised questions about the College Board's selection of Pearson to handle scoring given its history of problems. "Looks like we have a scoring recidivist to deal with," said Robert A. Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest.

For now, college officials, who were caught by surprise by the mistakes at the height of the admission season, said they were working to take the revised scores into account so that students are not disadvantaged by the errors, almost all of which lowered student scores. Although some of the mistakes cost students more than 300 points, the College Board said that 83 percent of the score errors were from 10 to 40 points.

    Company's Errors on SAT Scores Raise New Qualms About Testing, NYT, 10.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/education/10sat.html?hp&ex=1142053200&en=acf9a0805a601a24&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Online Colleges Receive a Boost From Congress

March 1, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid.

That change is expected to be of enormous value to the commercial education industry. Although both for-profit colleges and traditional ones have expanded their Internet and online offerings in recent years, only a few dozen universities are fully Internet-based, and most of them are for-profit ones.

The provision is just one sign of how an industry that once had a dubious reputation has gained new influence, with well-connected friends in the government and many Congressional Republicans sympathetic to their entrepreneurial ethic.

The Bush administration supported lifting the restriction on online education as a way to reach nontraditional students. Nonprofit universities and colleges opposed such a broad change, with some academics saying there was no proof that online education was effective. But for-profit colleges sought the rollback avidly.

"The power of the for-profits has grown tremendously," said Representative Michael N. Castle, Republican of Delaware, a member of the House Education and Workforce Committee who has expressed concerns about continuing reports of fraud. "They have a full-blown lobbying effort and give lots of money to campaigns. In 10 years, the power of this interest group has spiked as much as any you'll find."

Sally L. Stroup, the assistant secretary of education who is the top regulator overseeing higher education, is a former lobbyist for the University of Phoenix, the nation's largest for-profit college, with some 300,000 students.

Two of the industry's closest allies in Congress are Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, who just became House majority leader, and Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California, who is replacing Mr. Boehner as chairman of the House education committee.

And the industry has hired well-connected lobbyists like A. Bradford Card, the brother of the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr.

The elimination of the restriction on online education, included in a $39.5 billion budget-cutting package, is a case study in the new climate. Known as the 50 percent rule, the restriction was one of several enacted by Congress in 1992 after investigations showed that some for-profit trade schools were little more than diploma mills intended to harvest federal student loans.

Since then, the industry has grown enormously, with enrollment at such colleges outpacing that at traditional ones. In 2003, the last year for which statistics were available, 703,000 of the 16.9 million students at all degree-granting institutions were attending for-profit colleges.

These colleges offer a wide range of courses, including marketing, accounting, cooking and carpentry. Many attract students who have had limited success at other schools. Some offer certificates, while others issue associates, bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees. About 2,500 for-profit schools are accredited to offer federal student aid.

Yet commercial higher education continues to have a checkered record, particularly for aggressive recruitment and marketing. The Department of Education's inspector general, John P. Higgins Jr., testified in May that 74 percent of his fraud cases involved for-profit schools.

But commercial colleges found a sympathetic ear in the administration and Congress in their quest to remove the 50 percent rule. Representatives Boehner and McKeon sponsored the measure.

Laura Palmer Noone, president of the University of Phoenix, said the growth of Internet-based learning had shown it to be effective, especially for rural, military and working students.

Kevin Smith, a spokesman, said Mr. Boehner "views this as removing an unnecessary barrier to distance education." He added, "While continuing to ensure that there are strong antifraud protections in place, he believes we need to break down more barriers to education for low-income, first-generation and nontraditional students."

Some academics say the nation is rushing to expand online higher education because it is profitable, without serious studies of effectiveness.

"This is a growth industry and you get rich not by being skeptical, but by being enthusiastic," said Henry M. Levin, director of Columbia University's National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education.

"People at the academic conferences will say they did a survey about Internet-based education, but there are a lot of phantom statistics," he said, "and its all very promotional. We have not found a single rigorous study comparing online with conventional forms of instruction."

How fast the college landscape will change is uncertain. Sean Gallagher, a senior analyst at Eduventures, a Boston research firm, predicted that the proportion of students taking all their classes online could rise over the next 10 years or so to 25 percent from the current 7 percent.

To test online learning, Congress established a demonstration program in 1998 that allowed a few dozen colleges with online programs to request waivers from the 50 percent rule. The Department of Education reported last year that enrollment at eight of the colleges shot up 700 percent over six years.

Ms. Stroup has overseen the program since becoming an assistant secretary of education in 2002.

Several opponents of lifting the 50 percent rule said Ms. Stroup had been fair in policy evaluations. But in a 2004 audit, the Education Department's inspector general said a 2003 report she provided to Congress on the program "contained unsupported, incomplete and inaccurate statements."

Most were assertions that online education was working as well or better than traditional methods, with little risk. The inspector general, citing the collapse of one participant in the program, the Masters Institute in California, chided the Education Department for reporting that it had found "no evidence" that the rule change could pose hazards.

Ms. Stroup formally disagreed with the inspector general. In an interview, she said a subordinate had written the report, although she had signed off on it. In a later report to Congress, the department acknowledged "several possible risk factors."

Ms. Stroup, in the interview, said she had withdrawn from all decisions directly affecting the University of Phoenix. "I don't see myself as representing any one sector," she said. "We try to help all students."

Traditional colleges, in fighting repeal of the rule, cited the Masters Institute, whose online enrollment surged after it gained access to federal money. The institute collapsed in 2001 during a fraud investigation.

"What we opposed was that federal aid should go to these virtual universities that disguise themselves as colleges, where it's just something on the Internet with no resources behind it," said Sarah Flanagan, a vice president at the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, which represents nearly 1,000 nonprofit institutions.

The Department of Education estimated the change would cost the government $697 million over 10 years.

Representatives Boehner and McKeon have also pushed through committee other changes sought by the for-profit industry, and lobbyists and lawmakers gave them good chances of passage this year.

Unlike all but a few traditional universities, the for-profits have formed political action committees to channel campaign donations, especially to members of the House and Senate education committees.

While the $1.8 million that executives of the largest chains of proprietary colleges and their political action committees have donated to federal candidates since 2000 is not huge by Washington standards, the money is strategically donated.

About a fifth — $313,000 — went to Mr. Boehner and McKeon and political action committees they control, according to figures provided by the Center for Responsive Politics, which monitors campaign finances.

Mr. Smith said there was "zero" connection between the donations and Mr. Boehner's policy decisions. James Geoffrey, a spokesman for Mr. McKeon, said the donations had no bearing on his choices, either.

Some lobbyists for the traditional universities said that because few of them form political action committees, they are at a disadvantage.

"If I seek an appointment with a member of Congress, I get a staff member, if anybody," said David Hawkins, a lobbyist for the National Association of College Admissions Counsellors, which as a nonprofit group is barred from making campaign donations.

A. Bradford Card, who represents some commercial colleges in New York, said lawmakers were responding to commercial colleges' educational contributions. He said he had spoken several times with Mr. Boehner about his clients' agenda. Mr. Card said he never lobbied his brother, Mr. Bush's chief of staff.

"These are not fly-by-night schools," Mr. Card said "Members of Congress are really taking a look at this industry because they recognize that proprietary colleges are helping people get into the work force, pay taxes and become the best they can be."

    Online Colleges Receive a Boost From Congress, NYT, 1.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/national/01educ.html?hp&ex=1141275600&en=e94c4cbfbc560dbd&ei=5094&partner=homepage

And for Perfect Attendance, Johnny Gets...a Car

February 5, 2006
The New York Times
By PAM BELLUCK

CHELSEA, Mass. — Attendance at Chelsea High School had hovered at a disappointing 90 percent for years, and school officials were determined to turn things around. So, last fall they decided to give students in this poverty-stung city just north of Boston a little extra motivation: students would get $25 for every quarter they had perfect attendance and another $25 if they managed perfect attendance all year.

"I was at first taken a little aback by the idea: we're going to pay kids to come to school?" said the principal, Morton Orlov II. "But then I thought perfect attendance is not such a bad behavior to reward. We are sort of putting our money where our mouth is."

Chelsea High is not the only school trying to improve attendance with incentives to students. Across the country, schools have begun to offer cars, iPods — even a month's rent. Some of the prizes are paid for by local businesses or donors; others come out of school budgets.

In Hartford, last year, 9-year-old Fernando Vazquez won a raffle for students with perfect attendance and was given the choice of a new Saturn Ion or $10,000. (His parents chose the money.) At Oldham County High School in Buckner, Ky., Krystal Brooks, 19, won a canary yellow Ford Mustang. In Temecula, Calif., the school district prizes can include iPods, DVD players and a trip to Disneyland.

Many schools have been galvanized by the federal No Child Left Behind law, which factors attendance into its evaluations, and schools, especially in poor districts, are motivated by money from state governments, which is often based on average daily attendance.

In the Chicago public schools, students with perfect attendance for the first three months of the year are eligible to win $500 worth of groceries or up to $1,000 toward a rent or mortgage payment. Joi Mecks, a spokeswoman for the district, said that for every 1 percent increase in its attendance rate, the district received $18 million more in state money.

Schools in Fort Worth had a budget shortfall of $15 million last year, said Beatriz Mince, assistant coordinator for the district's Office of Parent and Public Engagement. "The only way to get extra money is average daily attendance," she said, adding that if average attendance increases by one student, the district receives an extra $4,700.

Last year, Fort Worth began holding an event for every student with perfect attendance for at least one six-week period. The students have chances to win cars, computers, shopping sprees at Pier One Kids, and a suite at a Texas Rangers game. More weeks of perfect attendance mean more chances of winning.

Some experts, however, say attendance incentives are a bad approach.

"It's against our grain to suggest that you have to cajole, seduce or trick students in order to get them to learn," said Dr. Jeff Bostic, director of school psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. "And where does it end? Are we going to need to give out a Porsche Boxster? Rather than say we're going to pay you if you show up, we've got to work harder at showing how school really does have relevance to these kids' lives."

But other experts say incentives make sense because they parallel the working world, where employees are given financial incentives to work harder or better. Some experts say incentives are acceptable if the rewards are education-related — laptops, say, instead of cars.

"In education, we just find such few things that work," said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning research organization. "If something works, the ideological burden to not do it has to be huge."

Whether the programs are working is an open question. At Chelsea High School this year, attendance rates actually went down — to as low as 85 percent. School officials and students said that the decline occurred because the new policy also softened punished for poor attendance. Students would no longer get grade-point reductions for unexcused absences or have grades withheld if they had more than two unexcused days per quarter.

Bianca Viggiani, a 17-year-old senior, said her attendance this year had been worse than ever. "You don't get penalized," she said on a day she happened to be in school. "Now, you can be absent up to 14 days straight," she said, before the school takes action.

And the incentive?

"It's $25," she said. "I mean, almost nobody cares."

But some districts, like Stone Creek Elementary School in Rossville, Ga., a poor, rural community, have seen significant improvements.

"When No Child Left Behind came in, that was a big wake-up call for us," said the Stone Creek principal, Mike Culberson.

Mr. Culberson said that about 15 percent of his students had been absent for more than 15 days in 2003. He started giving children with perfect attendance incentives like ice cream and chances to win bicycles, video game systems and other prizes displayed in the school's lobby.

In 2004 only 4.7 percent of students missed more than 15 days, Mr. Culberson said, and last year only 3.5 percent did. He said the average daily attendance was about 98 percent. He also said that scores on national reading and math tests had risen significantly, which he attributed to improved attendance.

"Some people could look at it like we're trying to bribe the kids to come to school," he said, "but if it takes that to instill a lifelong value in them, then it's worth it."

Back in Massachusetts, the headmaster at the high school in Lowell, William J. Samaras, said a program to give laptops to graduating seniors who missed no more than seven days of school drew criticism that "we're giving them a prize in a sense to do what they're supposed to do anyway."

But Mr. Samaras said the program worked, stanching an attitude among seniors that "attendance was for everybody but them." Of 670 seniors, 200 qualified for laptops last year, which turned the program into a raffle because the school had only 77 laptops to give away.

Some schools said incentives had prompted students to come to school even when they were sick. Mr. Culberson said a woman recently brought her daughter in a little late, saying, "We woke up neither of us feeling good, but she told me she had to come."

In the Forth Worth incentive program, average daily attendance in the 80,000-student district increased by about 200 students in the first year, said Ms. Mince of the Office of Parent and Public Engagement.

But some students, like 22-year-old Humberto Avila, who attends night school, were not motivated by the prize. "I like going to the school," said Mr. Avila, who won a Ford Ranger truck. "I think I got perfect attendance the whole time."

In Chicago, Joshua Lee, 14, won a month's mortgage payment, which helped his widowed mother. He said he did not know the district was giving awards for perfect attendance and was "pretty positive about school already."

Ms. Mecks, the district spokeswoman, said attendance was about the same as last year. She said it was too soon to evaluate the program.

Education experts could not think of any studies on whether attendance incentives work, but studies on whether incentives improve academic performance indicate that money can work but is most effective among younger students who are "more sort of willing to buy into a teacher or someone saying, 'This is important, try hard,' " said Harry O'Neil, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Southern California.

Professor O'Neil found that eighth graders performed better on tests when they were paid $1 for each correct answer, but 12th graders' performance did not improve.

He said he was intrigued by Chicago's program because the rent and grocery awards appealed to parents, who then might have greater interest in seeing that their children attend school. But he said he was skeptical of Chelsea's program because students did not collect the money until graduation.

"The trick with incentives is how big a thing does it have to be to be meaningful to the person," he said, "and also how long the delay is between doing something and getting a reward for it."

Administrators, teachers and students at Chelsea said the school's program also made it clear that punitive measures were needed. In the first quarter at Chelsea, 107 out of 1,500 students had perfect attendance, about the same as last year, said Mr. Orlov, the principal. In the second quarter, 73 students did.

One student with first-quarter perfect attendance was Stephanie Murcia, a 17-year-old junior who said she was motivated less by the $25 incentive than by the experience of failing her freshman year because of the absenteeism penalty under the old attendance policy. "I saw those F's, and it was kind of like a slap in the face," she said.

Students and teachers say it was obvious that absenteeism was up under the incentive-only policy. One teacher, John E. Cammarata, said that at times as many as half the students were missing from his first-period chemistry class. "I never had that problem last year," he said.

Joe Resnek, 16, the junior class president, said "the rooms are noticeably emptier, each class that I'm in."

Mr. Orlov said students clearly knew "that the big hammer is off" if they missed school. "Obviously the incentive didn't quite offset that."

This month, Mr. Orlov revised the policy, keeping the incentives but reinstating some penalties. On the first day of the revisions, he said, attendance was 93 percent. Some students, however, said the incentive-only policy had had unexpected benefits because those who attended school were more likely to want to be there.

"Usually in a classroom that has kids that don't want to come to school, you don't get a lot of participation," said Sonya Garcia, 16, a junior. "It lowers my motivation for working. If I'm working with people who are focused, it creates competition and that gets me motivated."

Mr. Resnek agreed. "It's almost created a better school," he said. "It's selfish, but it's better for us who are here."

    And for Perfect Attendance, Johnny Gets...a Car, NYT, 5.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/education/05reward.html?hp&ex=1139115600&en=26743c27859b8443&ei=5094&partner=homepage

How to Get to Princeton? Just Grab Onto Its Name

February 2, 2006
The New York Times
By PATRICK McGEEHAN

For its first 150 years, Princeton University was called the College of New Jersey. Then it adopted the name of its hometown. Now it wants to stop others from freely using the Princeton name.

The latest interloper is Merrill Lynch & Company, the nation's biggest brokerage firm. Merrill said this week that it intended to put the Princeton name on its mutual funds to gain wider acceptance among investors.

But the university's lawyers demanded that Merrill Lynch reconsider, arguing that the company was trying to trade on the school's image as a bastion of higher education, one with a well-managed $12 billion endowment.

"It now appears that Merrill is planning to exploit the university's name and reputation for its commercial gain," a spokeswoman for the university, Cass Cliatt, said yesterday. "We don't want Princeton to be associated with the performance of Merrill's funds."

Merrill Lynch is the latest in a long list of companies that have tried to cash in on the cachet of the Princeton name. There are Princeton Ski Shops, Princeton Driving School, even the Princeton Review college-preparation business, none of which have a connection to the university.

Despite the proliferation, the university has not been shy about trying to safeguard its name, Ms. Cliatt said.

Its lawyers have succeeded in stamping out some uses of the name, she said, and have reached an easing of tensions with others, including the Princeton Review.

The problem for the school dates to 1896, when it took on the name of its town, something no other Ivy League school has done. Since then, the fortunes of the two have become intertwined, but when the university tries to beat back any incursions, it fights alone.

"I wish I had a dollar for every company or corporation or homeowner that used our address," said Phyllis L. Marchand, the mayor of Princeton Township. "They're all Princeton wannabes. It's flattering, but I wish we got some benefit from it."

Princeton officials were more flabbergasted than flattered when Merrill Lynch announced on Monday that it planned to take its own name off its money-management operation and rename the business Princeton Portfolio Research and Management. In a statement released from its corporate headquarters in Manhattan, Merrill Lynch said that the new name draws not on the school's reputation but on the history of the operation, "which has long been based in the Princeton, N.J., area."

But, as Ms. Cliatt pointed out with a tone of disdain, none of that history transpired in Princeton itself. "Actually, they're not in Princeton," she said. "They're in Plainsboro."

Indeed, Merrill is the biggest employer and taxpayer in Plainsboro, a fast-developing town in Middlesex County that clings to Princeton, in Mercer County, from across busy Route 1.

Plainsboro's longtime mayor, Peter A. Cantu, said his town, like others close by, is filled with businesses that claim a dubious connection to their more prestigious neighbor.

"All the communities surrounding Princeton get a little irritated with that, but it is what it is," Mr. Cantu said.

Princeton University officials are more concerned about the name than the place, Ms. Cliatt said. She pointed to a quotation from a senior Merrill Lynch executive as evidence that the company had the university, not the town, in mind when choosing the name.

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal quoted Robert Doll, who oversees Merrill Lynch's mutual funds, explaining the choice by saying that, "Princeton has positive connotations, given the prestige of the university."

Yesterday, Merrill Lynch backed away from that remark, saying in another statement that "we regret having made any comments that might prompt management of Princeton University to think we will be using their name and reputation to support our new brand."

Still, Hugh C. Hansen, a professor at Fordham University School of Law, said he thought "the choice of a name is problematical" for Merrill Lynch. He said that the value of the Princeton name derives from the university's presence.

"Given the fact that they're not in Princeton," he said of Merrill, "it sounds like they're free-riding."

    How to Get to Princeton? Just Grab Onto Its Name, NYT, 2.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/nyregion/02princeton.html

In Public Schools, the Name Game as a Donor Lure

January 26, 2006
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

PHILADELPHIA — Next fall, a stunning $55 million high school will open on the edge of Fairmount Park here. For now, it is called the School of the Future, a state-of-the-art building with features like a Web design laboratory and a green roof that incorporates a storm-water management system. But it may turn out to be the school of the future in another sense, too: It is a public school being used to raise a lot of private money.

A glossy brochure offers dozens of opportunities for donors to get their name or corporate logo emblazoned on the walls : $1 million for the performing arts pavilion, $750,00 for the gyms or the main administrative suite (including the principal's office), $500,000 for the food court/ cybercafe, $50,000 for the science laboratories, $25,000 for each of the classrooms, and so on. Microsoft, a partner in designing the school, has already committed $100,000 for the Microsoft Visitors Center.

For a cool $5 million, a donor gets the grand prize — naming the school.

"My approach is Leave No Dollar Behind," said Paul Vallas, chief executive of the Philadelphia schools, although he added that a school board review of each transaction would weed out undesirable donors, which he said included tobacco and liquor companies.

"There are tremendous needs in this system," Mr. Vallas said, "where 85 percent of the kids are below poverty level. I'm not uncomfortable with corporations giving us money and getting their names on things. As long as it's not inappropriate, I don't see any downside."

Four years ago, it was big news when the small Brooklawn, N.J., school district got a $100,000 donation from a local supermarket and christened its new gym the ShopRite of Brooklawn Center. Then came the Rust-Oleum Field at Vernon Hills High School, north of Chicago, (a $100,000 donation) and the Eastern Financial Florida Credit Union stadium at Everglades High School in Broward County, Fla. (a $500,000 donation).

Now, naming rights have expanded nationwide — and far beyond athletic facilities. Strapped school districts have begun a blitz of new efforts to attract private money. Many have hired development officers to seek out their community's big donors, and consider everything from corporate sponsorship of the high school prom to selling advertising space on school roofs.

In states where it is legal, there are districts that now sell advertisements on their school buses. And districts across the country are for the first time dangling naming privileges as an incentive to contribute or rewriting their policies to specify what can be made available for what level of donation.

Because the whole issue is so new, education officials say it is hard to know how to proceed.

Frank Till, the Broward County superintendent, said his district started thinking about naming rights several years ago, when The Miami Herald expressed interest in having a stadium at Flanagan High School carry its name.

"It didn't go anywhere, mostly because we didn't have a policy, and we didn't know what was a fair value," Mr. Till said. "Now we've adopted a formal policy and a process for deciding what's acceptable, and we're ready to go. The board just signed off on school bus advertising, and we're going to look into selling space on some school roofs that you fly over on the way into Fort Lauderdale. We're just hoping someone out there will be interested."

The push for private money stems from several different pressures, school officials say. In most states, tight budgets, new government requirements and rising operating costs have left the pool of state education financing too small to keep up with school needs or desires.

Many communities already feel taxed out and are unwilling to support increases in local property taxes. And public schools have become increasingly aware of how colleges, hospitals and private schools use naming rights in fund-raising.

"We're trying to act like the development office of a private school," said Cindy Johnson, a former school board member in Newburyport, Mass., who now runs a foundation to raise private money for the district. "They can't live on tuition alone, and we can't live on taxes alone."

Over the last five years, public schools have become an increasingly popular cause for corporations, society donors and foundations. In New York, since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the schools, he and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein have raised $311 million in private funds. The benefits are clear — new schools, new playgrounds and refurbished libraries.

But policy experts and school officials say private financing for public schools carries real risks: What happens if and when the private money dries up? Will donors take a disproportionate role in shaping school policy? And each time private money fills the gaps left by public financing, does it enable legislators and taxpayers to shrug off responsibility for supporting education?

"Public schools are the most important public institutions outside of government," said Wendy Puriefoy, president of the Public Education Network, an association of education advocacy groups. "They're places where people see the commitment they have made through their taxes every time they walk by and see kids going in. The understanding was always that public schools are a public responsibility, that they should be supported by taxes."

The trend toward private financing may also exacerbate the gap between rich and poor districts because affluent ones are often more sophisticated about fund-raising — although, as Philadelphia is showing, a high-profile project can let even a struggling urban district attract widespread interest.

"We're losing our public education system in this country," said Alex Molnar, director of the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University. "It is being eroded, inch by inch, by an ongoing blurring of the distinction between public interest and private good. There's a big equity problem here. By definition, parental funding, private foundations and naming rights are disequalizing."

Newburyport, a charming New England seaport with a lively tourist trade, does not look like a town where the schools would be pressed for money. But looks can be deceiving: School officials say their budget is so tight that, even after imposing an array of parent-paid fees for activities and transportation, Newburyport has had to cut elementary school foreign language and middle school theater classes and assign one principal to cover two of the district's three elementary schools.

Big property tax increases would be politically unpalatable. "Like many towns, only about 20 percent of our households have kids, so there are limits on what you can ask for," said Christin Walth, executive director of the Newburyport Education Foundation, organized in 2000 to raise money for the school.

So the district has become more aggressive about seeking private donations. As part of that effort, the foundation in 2004 began offering a wide range of naming opportunities at the high school, an imposing brick edifice on a hill above High Street — $300 for a name plaque on a seat in the high school auditorium, $10,000 for the principal's office, $100,000 for the cafeteria or the library. It has had few takers. There are only a few nameplates sprinkled around the school, on the aisle seats in the auditorium, a bench in the courtyard, the television production studio.

But late last year, the Institution for Savings, a mutual savings bank, pledged $600,000 to rebuild the outdated middle school science laboratories. The science area will bear its name — and so will the high school gym floor.

"We're just trying to take care of our little corner of the world," said Mark Welch, the bank president. "We are going to take some naming opportunities with this donation, but that had almost nothing to do with the decision. Problems get solved one city and one school at a time, and this is our community."

Is the bank's contribution enabling taxpayers not to shoulder a burden that should be theirs? "We may be," Mr. Welch said. "But if not doing this was the way to make the point that you, the city, should pay for this, more and more kids will fall behind."

Mary Murray, the Newburyport superintendent, sounds ambivalent about the move toward private financing.

"Hospitals do it, and universities do it," Ms. Murray said. "But is it troubling? Yes, on one level, because I believe public education means exactly that. But the state made a 20 percent cut across the board four years ago, and aid to cities and towns was cut almost the same percentage. Meanwhile our health care, salaries and utilities costs are rising. There's no light at the end of the tunnel, and when you're in the situation we're in, you have to do what's right for the students you're serving."

For businesses, schools can be an attractive target.

"One standard goal corporations have in their marketing programs is making the corporation itself seem more desirable and good, and it's hard to find something more desirable and good than public schools," Mr. Molnar said. "Simply associating your name in perpetuity with a school assures you an opportunity to enhance your standing in the community. It's like a brick-and-mortar billboard in perpetuity."


At least a few districts, after considering all the ramifications of naming rights for donors, have rejected the idea. In Seminole County, Fla., where naming-rights guidelines were considered last year, Dede Schaffner, one of the five school board members, was an outspoken opponent.

"If we get to the point where you can put your name on a school just because you have a fat wallet, that's not right," Ms. Schaffner said. "Sure we could use more money, but I just wasn't ready to sell our soul, and I felt that's what we were being asked to do. I didn't know until the final vote that I'd convinced most of the others that this wasn't a good idea."

    In Public Schools, the Name Game as a Donor Lure, NYT, 26.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/26/education/26schools.html?hp&ex=1138251600&en=693efc6642421766&ei=5094&partner=homepage

College Aid Plan Widens U.S. Role in High Schools

January 22, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

When Republican senators quietly tucked a major new student aid program into the 774-page budget bill last month, they not only approved a five-year, $3.75 billion initiative. They also set up what could be an important shift in American education: for the first time the federal government will rate the academic rigor of the nation's 18,000 high schools.

The measure, backed by the Bush administration and expected to pass the House when it returns next month, would provide $750 to $1,300 grants to low-income college freshmen and sophomores who have completed "a rigorous secondary school program of study" and larger amounts to juniors and seniors majoring in math, science and other critical fields.

It leaves it to the secretary of education to define rigorous, giving her a new foothold in matters of high school curriculums.

Mindful of the delicate politics at play when Washington expands its educational role into matters zealously guarded as local prerogatives, senior Department of Education officials said they would consult with governors and other groups in determining which high school programs would allow students to qualify for grants.

"I do not see this, at all, as an expansion of the federal role," Sally L. Stroup, an assistant secretary of education, said in an interview. Washington, she said, would not impose a curriculum, just judge programs of study outlined by states. "Our job is to make sure that those are valid standards and valid programs," she said. Furthermore, states and communities can decide on their own whether their students will compete for the grants. "We don't force people to do anything," Ms. Stroup said.

But Terry W. Hartle, a senior vice president at the American Council on Education, the nation's largest association of colleges and universities, said the new program "involves the federal government in curricular matters in a way that opens a new chapter in educational history."

"I'm very sympathetic to the goal of getting more students to take more math and science courses, but this particular plan has the potential to turn the Department of Education into a national school board," Mr. Hartle said.

Ms. Stroup and other department officials said they had not yet figured out how, if the program is approved, they would go about identifying which students to qualify from which high schools. The department would have $790 million in new grant money to distribute to college-bound students by this fall, a tight timeline that Ms. Stroup said would force the department to postpone the rule-making process that usually accompanies new programs. Susan Aspey, a department spokeswoman, estimated that more than 500,000 students would receive grants.

Several prominent educators said they expected the legislation to unleash a scramble by high schools to gain recognition of their curricula as rigorous.

The Constitution outlines no role for the federal government in education, and local control of schools is a cornerstone of the American system. But Washington's role has grown since Congress began financing college studies for World War II veterans. Several laws increased federal aid to education, including the landmark National Defense Act of 1958, but specifically prohibited federal officials from assuming supervision or control over programs of instruction. And while President Bush's education law, No Child Left Behind, imposed mandatory testing, it allowed the states to choose their own tests.

Like the No Child Left Behind law, the new grants are largely an effort to take a Texas idea nationwide. The legislation is modeled on the Texas Scholars program, begun during Mr. Bush's governorship, which enlisted certain Texas high schools and encouraged their students to take a "rigorous course of study," defined to include four years of English; three and a half years of social studies; two years of foreign language; and a year each of algebra, geometry, advanced algebra, biology, chemistry and physics.

After Mr. Bush became president, his administration financed a Center for State Scholars, based in Austin, to spread a curriculum modeled on Texas Scholars nationwide. In the 2006 budget, he proposed supplemental Pell Grants for college freshmen and sophomores who had completed the "rigorous" curriculum outlined in the State Scholars initiative, in which some 300 school districts in 15 states are participating. A House bill closely reflected that administration proposal.

But the legislation evolved. Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, responding to rising anxiety over America's economic competitiveness, sponsored legislation establishing new grants to college juniors and seniors majoring in math, science or engineering. In December, Republican lawmakers working with the administration grafted the House and Senate bills together, adding language requiring the secretary to recognize at least one rigorous high school program in each state. Democratic lawmakers said they were barely consulted.

"We were shut almost completely out of the process," said Representative George Miller of California, the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The new one-year grants, designed to supplement the broader, $13 billion Pell Grant program, range from $750 for low-income college freshmen and $1,300 for sophomores to $4,000 for juniors and seniors who are pursuing majors in the physical, life or computer sciences, mathematics, technology, engineering or certain foreign languages. Applicants must have a 3.0 grade point average to be eligible as sophomores, juniors and seniors.

The administration's original proposal would have been simple to administer. But under the proposal approved by the Senate, Department of Education officials would need to scrutinize high school courses of study and discuss curricular matters with local officials to a degree that Washington officials never have.

"We haven't actually sat down yet and decided how we're going to go about it," Ms. Stroup said.

Pell Grants have been based on financial need, but eligibility for the new grants is more complicated, with requirements changing twice as students advance through college. The requirement that students maintain a B average, for instance, will force the department to decide how to handle applicants attending institutions like Hampshire College and Sarah Lawrence College, which do not give letter or numeric grades. With little time before crucial decisions must be made, some educators said they were expecting considerable confusion.

"This will be like trying to land a 747 on an airstrip built for a single-engine plane," said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "And we're all going to have to fly in by the seat of our pants."

The department's most politically ticklish determinations, however, appear to be those involving which high school programs are rigorous.

Department officials said that in the 35 states that do not participate in the State Scholars initiative they hoped to find that governors or other authorities had established programs recognizing rigorous courses of study. The National Governors Association last year issued an "Action Agenda" that urged the authorities in every state to define a rigorous curriculum as a requisite for high school graduation, but their model included no recommendations for science or foreign languages. Dane Linn, director of the association's education division, said it was not clear whether states had moved to enact the agenda.

Some have developed home-grown programs that the department could easily recognize as rigorous. Indiana, for instance, has designated a challenging curriculum it calls the Core 40, and more than a dozen states, including New York, extend higher-rated diplomas to students who complete more difficult coursework. Virginia awards an "advanced studies high school diploma" to students who complete four years of English, math, science and history, three years of foreign language, and other requirements.

But perhaps 20 states do not participate in State Scholars, have not recognized any similarly rigorous curriculum and do not offer more than a basic diploma. In such states, Ms. Stroup said, the department may consider recognizing some combination of Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses as a rigorous program of study.

"We're going to have to go out and just talk to schools," Ms. Stroup said.

Even in states like New Jersey and Connecticut, where the State Scholars program is operating, however, it may be politically awkward for federal officials to declare programs of study at a few high schools to be rigorous while withholding that designation from others, educators said. In New Jersey, for instance, just 35 of 300 high schools participate in State Scholars. In Connecticut, 4 of 180 public high schools participate.

Another problem is that private school operators believe that the legislation renders their graduates ineligible by saying applicants must have completed a "program of study established by a state or local educational agency and recognized by the secretary." The bill "would inadvertently exclude over 5.3 million private K-12 school students," the National Association of Independent Schools, which represents some 1,200 private schools, said in a letter to senators last month. The same legislative language may also exclude parochial and home-schooled students.

Conservative groups that have protested the No Child Left Behind law are also grumbling. Michael D. Ostrolenk, education policy director of the Eagle Forum, called the proposal "more meddling" by Washington.

"If people in Congress really want to improve the educational system in the United States, they should start by abolishing the federal Department of Education," Mr. Ostrolenk said.

Several Colorado schools have turned down some federal funds because they dislike No Child Left Behind's extension of federal influence into schools, and some Colorado educators expressed similar reservations about the new grants.

"The president said he would like to extend N.C.L.B. into the high schools, and this is just the precursor for a new federal invasion," said Gerald Keefe, chairman of the Colorado Rural Schools Caucus.

Ms. Stroup shrugged off such criticism.

"We believe high school reform is important to the country; so do the governors," she said. "So I don't think we're out in left field talking about trying to use incentives to get kids to take good programs."

    College Aid Plan Widens U.S. Role in High Schools, NYT, 22.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/education/22grants.html?hp&ex=1137992400&en=81cd1a4fda833059&ei=5094&partner=homepage

New York Moves to Limit Colleges That Seek Profit

January 21, 2006
The New York Times
By KAREN W. ARENSON

The New York State Board of Regents has imposed a moratorium on new commercial colleges in the state, in the face of explosive growth in their enrollments and increasing reports of problems.

The freeze comes as state education officials, the governor and lawmakers are examining ways to tighten regulations or financing of this fast-growing sector of higher education, which is consuming more than $100 million in state aid.

This week, Gov. George E. Pataki proposed that the state withhold financial aid from college students who had not graduated from high school; many of them attend profit-making schools.

"This is a cottage industry that needs to be better regulated, and more attention must be paid to it," said Merryl H. Tisch, a regent.

New York is not alone in trying to clamp down. Commercial schools, which often advertise heavily, promising quick career training to poorly educated students, are booming around the country. Increasingly, they are drawing the attention of federal and state law enforcement officials.

Corinthian Colleges Inc. disclosed in November that the attorney general in Florida was investigating sales practices at some of its campuses there. Decker College in Kentucky, where William F. Weld, a candidate for governor in New York, was chief executive, went bankrupt in the fall after federal agents raided the campus and the federal government cut off its student aid.

California recently charged the Brooks Institute of Photography with misleading recruitment practices and made correcting the problems a condition of keeping its license. Brooks is contesting the action.

Robyn C. Smith, a deputy attorney general in California, said the commercial schools were "a current focus" for her office. She said the number of cases it reviewed in the past year had risen.

New York has also been investigating five commercial colleges and has taken actions against several.

"It is probably very good that the Regents are doing what they are doing," said David W. Breneman, the dean of the education school at the University of Virginia and an expert on profit-making higher education. "In my experience in this arena, the New York Regents are probably the toughest group the proprietaries face in any state."

The State Education Department recently ordered the Interboro Institute, based in New York City, to halve the number of new students it enrolls in the coming year. The department acted after finding that the commercial college, one of the fastest-growing in the state, was cheating in certifying student eligibility for aid and was not providing enough academic support for its students.

The department is also trying to close Taylor Business Institute, also in New York City, saying it has made "unsatisfactory movement" to improve academic quality. Donald Kinsella, a lawyer representing Taylor, said it had filed an appeal.

Just this week, the New York State comptroller's office released an audit showing that nearly a fifth of the students it had scrutinized at the ASA Institute of Business and Computer Technology in New York City were accepted solely on the basis of their own notarized statements that they had graduated from high schools in other countries but had difficulties getting their records. The auditors found that some of the students who claimed to be high school graduates were not.

Alex Shchegol, ASA's president, said his school stopped using affidavits after receiving the audit results. "We are trying very hard to help people to change their lives," he said. "We cannot accept students who will not benefit from instruction."

The comptroller's office, which directed the school to repay more than $500,000 in state aid, called on the Education Department to re-evaluate the use of affidavits.

There are 41 commercial degree-granting colleges in New York and about 400 commercial career schools that do not grant degrees. Many charge tuition of about $9,000, the amount that can be covered by federal and state financial aid grants.

The flow of public money to such schools is one reason they are drawing scrutiny. A recurring question is whether some schools are enrolling students who have little hope of graduating simply to capture the financial aid. In New York, their students drew $136 million in state tuition assistance grants in 2003-4 - 17 percent of the those grants - even though they accounted for about 7 percent of the undergraduates.

State officials said that the moratorium on approving new colleges, enacted last week, could last months and lead to tougher regulations. Officials said that six schools have applications pending that would be frozen by the moratorium, but declined to name them. The University of Phoenix, the industry giant, has been trying for years to enter New York.

Saul B. Cohen, a regent, said he would press to stiffen the regulations on a number of fronts. He wants the schools to raise admissions requirements and use outside testing companies to conduct the testing used for financial aid eligibility. He said he also wanted the state to impose penalties more severe than "an admonition" for school practices like changing students' test answers to make them eligible for financial aid.

And he called for forcing commercial schools to seek certification from other accrediting bodies, like the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, rather than from the Regents themselves. "Our process is not as thorough and tough as Middle States accreditation," he said, noting that the best commercial schools have outside accreditation now.

A critical issue, he said, is that the Education Department lacks the staff and money to carry out the kind of expanded oversight he seeks.

The department started trying to monitor the commercial colleges more closely about three years ago, and watches for signals like rapid expansion to flag potential problems. Last summer, it uncovered deceptions at Interboro when it sent undercover agents to the school, a technique it said it planned to use at other schools as well.

Johanna Duncan-Poitier, deputy education commissioner for higher education and the professions in New York, said the department had encouraged the review of regulatory practices because the market was evolving. She said it would "probably be May" before the department made recommendations to the Regents, the 16-member panel elected by the State Legislature to oversee all education in New York.

The department faces pressure not only from the Regents, but from state lawmakers.

Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, a Long Island Republican and chairman of the Senate's Higher Education Committee, and Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, a Westchester County Democrat, say tougher oversight is necessary. "Whenever there is a lot of cash on the table, there will be people in the marketplace who will try and take advantage of the system for their own economic benefit," Senator LaValle said.

Another push this week came from Mr. Pataki, who proposed withholding financial aid from college students who had not graduated from high school. Students would become eligible for state aid after earning 24 college credits. The schools would be expected to provide aid themselves until the students became eligible. Then they would be repaid.

Not everyone is certain that commercial higher education needs broad fixing. Assemblyman Ron Canestrari, a Democrat from the Albany area who is chairman of the Assembly's Higher Education Committee, said, "If there are some problems, we should not leap to the conclusion that there are problems throughout the sector, because I don't believe there are."

Some commercial school leaders said that they welcomed the closer look at their institutions, but that it should not stop with the for-profit sector.

Bruce Leftwich, vice president for government relations at the Career College Association, an industry trade group based in Washington, said his group believed that if there are any institutions "defrauding the system, they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

But, he said, "there is fraud and abuse in all sectors of higher education." He added, "If states are looking at proprietary schools and colleges, they should also be looking at all institutions."

    New York Moves to Limit Colleges That Seek Profit, NYT, 21.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/21/nyregion/21regents.html?hp&ex=1137906000&en=45f8415f4943b577&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Higher education and the poor

Rebuilding the American dream machine

Jan 19th 2006 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

A parable of elitism in universities

FOR America's colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn have to be made by the end of December, so a university's popularity is put to an objective standard: how many people want to attend. One of the more unlikely offices to have been flooded with mail is that of the City University of New York (CUNY), a public college that lacks, among other things, a famous sports team, bucolic campuses and raucous parties (it doesn't even have dorms), and, until recently, academic credibility.

A primary draw at CUNY is a programme for particularly clever students, launched in 2001. Some 1,100 of the 60,000 students at CUNY's five top schools receive a rare thing in the costly world of American colleges: free education. Those accepted by CUNY's honours programme pay no tuition fees; instead they receive a stipend of $7,500 (to help with general expenses) and a laptop computer. Applications for early admissions into next year's programme are up 70%.

Admission has nothing to do with being an athlete, or a child of an alumnus, or having an influential sponsor, or being a member of a particularly aggrieved ethnic group—criteria that are increasingly important at America's elite colleges. Most of the students who apply to the honours programme come from relatively poor families, many of them immigrant ones. All that CUNY demands is that these students be diligent and clever.

Last year, the average standardised test score of this group was in the top 7% in the country. Among the rest of CUNY's students averages are lower, but they are now just breaking into the top third (compared with the bottom third in 1997). CUNY does not appear alongside Harvard and Stanford on lists of America's top colleges, but its recent transformation offers a neat parable of meritocracy revisited.

Until the 1960s, a good case could be made that the best deal in American tertiary education was to be found not in Cambridge or Palo Alto, but in Harlem, at a small public school called City College, the core of CUNY. America's first free municipal university, founded in 1847, offered its services to everyone bright enough to meet its gruelling standards.

City's golden era came in the last century, when America's best known colleges restricted the number of Jewish students they would admit at exactly the time when New York was teeming with the bright children of poor Jewish immigrants. In 1933-54 City produced nine future Nobel laureates, including the 2005 winner for economics, Robert Aumann (who graduated in 1950); Hunter, its affiliated former women's college, produced two, and a sister branch in Brooklyn produced one. City educated Felix Frankfurter, a pivotal figure on the Supreme Court (class of 1902), Ira Gershwin (1918), Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine (1934) and Robert Kahn, an architect of the internet (1960). A left-wing place in the 1930s and 1940s, City spawned many of the neo-conservative intellectuals who would later swing to the right, such as Irving Kristol (class of 1940, extra-curricular activity: anti-war club), Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer.

What went wrong? Put simply, City dropped its standards. It was partly to do with demography, partly to do with earnest muddleheadedness. In the 1960s, universities across the country faced intense pressure to admit more minority students. Although City was open to all races, only a small number of black and Hispanic students passed the strict tests (including a future secretary of state, Colin Powell). That, critics decided, could not be squared with City's mission to “serve all the citizens of New York”. At first the standards were tweaked, but this was not enough, and in 1969 massive student protests shut down City's campus for two weeks. Faced with upheaval, City scrapped its admissions standards altogether. By 1970, almost any student who graduated from New York's high schools could attend.

The quality of education collapsed. At first, with no barrier to entry, enrolment climbed, but in 1976 the city of New York, which was then in effect bankrupt, forced CUNY to impose tuition fees. An era of free education was over, and a university which had once served such a distinct purpose joined the muddle of America's lower-end education.

By 1997, seven out of ten first-year students in the CUNY system were failing at least one remedial test in reading, writing or maths (meaning that they had not learnt it to high-school standard). A report commissioned by the city in 1999 concluded that “Central to CUNY's historic mission is a commitment to provide broad access, but its students' high drop-out rates and low graduation rates raise the question: ‘Access to what?’ ”

Using the report as ammunition, profound reforms were pushed through by New York's then mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, and another alumnus, Herman Badillo (1951), America's first Puerto Rican congressman. A new head of CUNY was appointed. Matthew Goldstein, a mathematician (1963), has shifted the focus back towards higher standards amid considerable controversy.

For instance, by 2001, all of CUNY's 11 “senior” colleges (ie, ones that offer full four-year courses) had stopped offering remedial education. This prompted howls from the teaching faculty, who said it would “create a ghetto-like separation between levels of colleges”, keeping black and Hispanic students out of the best schools. In fact, the racial composition of the senior schools, monitored obsessively by critics, has remained largely unchanged: one in four students at the senior colleges is black, one in five is Latino. A third have ties to Puerto Rico, Jamaica, China and the Dominican Republic.

Admissions standards have been raised. Students applying to CUNY's senior colleges now need respectable scores on either a national, state or CUNY test, and the admissions criteria for the honours programme are the toughest in the university's history. Contrary to what Mr Goldstein's critics predicted, higher standards have attracted more students, not fewer: this year, enrolment at CUNY is at a record high. There are also anecdotal signs that CUNY is once again picking up bright locals, especially in science. One advanced biology class at City now has twice as many students as it did in the late 1990s. Last year, two students, both born in the Soviet Union, won Rhodes scholarships, and a Bronx native who won the much sought-after Intel Science Prize is now in the honours programme.

All this should not imply that CUNY is out of the woods. Much of it looks run down. CUNY's annual budget of $1.7 billion has stayed largely unchanged, even as student numbers have risen. With New York City's finances still precarious, city and state support for the university has fallen by more than one-third since 1991 in real terms. It has, however, begun to bring in private money.

A new journalism school will open in the autumn, helped by a $4m grant from the Sulzberger family, who control the New York Times, and led by Business Week's former editor, Steve Shepard (class of 1961). Efforts to raise a $1.2 billion endowment have passed the half-way mark, helped by (formerly estranged) alumni. Intel's former chairman, Andrew Grove, who graduated from City in 1960 as a penniless Hungarian immigrant, donated $26m (about 30% of City's operating budget) to the engineering school, calling his alma mater “a veritable American dream machine”.

There are broader lessons to draw from CUNY, especially to do with creating opportunities in higher education for the poor. Currently, only 3% of the students in America's top colleges come from families in the lowest income quartile and only 10% from the bottom half, according to a study by Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose for the Century Foundation. Most students are relatively well-off, and their numbers include plenty of racial minorities who receive preferential status independent of their economic circumstances.

For all its imperfections, CUNY's model of low tuition fees and high standards offers a different approach. And its recent history may help to dispel the myth that high academic standards deter students and donors. “Elitism”, Mr Goldstein contends, “is not a dirty word.”

    Rebuilding the American dream machine, E, 19.1.2006, http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5417329

California Parents File Suit Over High School Course

January 11, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

A group of parents are suing their small California school district to force it to cancel a four-week high school elective on intelligent design, creationism and evolution that it is offering as a philosophy course.

The course at Frazier Mountain High School in Lebec, which serves a rural area north of Los Angeles, was proposed by a special education teacher last month and approved by the board of trustees in an emergency meeting on New Year's Day. The 11 parents are seeking a temporary restraining order to stop the course, which is being held during the session that ends on Feb. 3.

Last month, a Federal District Court in Pennsylvania ruled that it was unconstitutional to teach intelligent design in a public school science class because it promoted a particular religious belief. After the ruling, people on both sides of the debate suggested that it might be constitutionally permissible to examine intelligent design in a philosophy, comparative religion or social studies class.

But the parents, represented by lawyers with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, contend that the teacher is advocating intelligent design and "young earth creationism" and is not examining those ideas in a neutral way alongside evolution.

Intelligent design posits that biological life is so complex that it must have been designed by an intelligent force. Young earth creationism holds to the biblical account of the origins of life and the belief that the earth is 6,000 years old.

In their suit, the parents said the syllabus originally listed 24 videos to be shown to students, with 23 "produced or distributed by religious organizations and assume a pro-creationist, anti-evolution stance." They said the syllabus listed two evolution experts who would speak to the class. One was a local parent and scientist who said he had already refused the speaking invitation and was now suing the district; the other was Francis H. C. Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, who died in 2004.

A course description distributed to students and parents said, "This class will take a close look at evolution as a theory and will discuss the scientific, biological and biblical aspects that suggest why Darwin's philosophy is not rock solid."

The school principal referred inquiries to the superintendent, John W. Wright, who was in Washington and did not respond to an interview request.

But Mr. Wright said in a letter on Jan. 6 in response to a complaint from Americans United, "Our legal advisers have pointed out that they are unaware of any court or California statute which has forbidden public schools to explore cultural phenomena, including history, religion or creation myths."

Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, said, "This is apparently the next wave of efforts to bring creationism to schools, and that's why we want to dry it up immediately."

The school district, with 1,425 students, serves several towns in a mountain area where many students are home schooled. The special education teacher, who is married to the pastor of the local Assemblies of God church, amended her syllabus and the course title, from Philosophy of Intelligent Design to Philosophy of Design after parents complained. The course was approved by the trustees in a 3-to-2 vote, despite testimony from science and math teachers that it would undermine the science curriculum. The parents who brought the lawsuit said 13 students were enrolled in the class.

Kitty Jo Nelson, a trustee, said the community was split.

"If we had to describe this in one word," Ms. Nelson said, "it would be 'controversial.' "

    California Parents File Suit Over High School Course, NYT, 11.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/national/11design.html