History > 2006 > USA > Education (II)
SAT Reading and Math Scores
Show a Significant Decline
August 30, 2006
The New York Times
By KAREN W. ARENSON
The average score on the reading and math portions of the
newly expanded SAT showed the largest decline in 31 years, according to a report
released yesterday by the College Board on the performance of the high school
class of 2006.
The drop confirmed earlier reports from puzzled college officials that they were
seeing lower scores from applicants. The average score on the critical reading
portion of the SAT, formerly known as the verbal test, fell 5 points, to 503,
out of a maximum possible score of 800. The average math score fell 2 points, to
518. Together they amounted to the lowest combined score since 2002.
Officials of the College Board, the nonprofit organization that administers the
SAT, dismissed suggestions by numerous high school guidance counselors that
students were getting tired out by the new three-part test which now runs three
and three-quarters hours, rather than three.
“Fatigue is not a factor,” Wayne Camara, vice president for research and
analysis at the College Board said at a news conference. “We are not trying to
say that students are not tired. But it is not affecting, on the whole, student
performance.”
Instead, the officials attributed the drop to a decline in the number of
students who took the exam more than once. The board said 47 percent of this
year’s students took the test only once, up from 44 percent last year. The
number taking the test three times fell to less than 13 percent from nearly 15
percent.
Students typically gain 14 points a section when they take the test a second
time, and another 10 or 11 points a section on the third try.
The SAT writing test includes a 25-minute essay, which counts for about 30
percent of the writing score, and 49 multiple-choice questions on grammar and
usage, which count for the rest. The average score on the writing section was
497 out of a possible 800, the board said.
Girls performed better than boys on this section of the exam, averaging 502
versus 491 for boys. That partly offset girls’ lower scores on math and reading,
but did not close the longstanding score gap between boy and girls.
Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, pointed out that the
decline in scores represented less than one-half of a test question in reading
and one-fifth of one test question in math. Still it was the largest year to
year decline since 1975, and officials expressed concerns about the overall
performance of American students.
“The data does suggest that as a nation, critical reading and writing are
lagging behind the progress we are making in math,” Mr. Camara said.
The SAT score decline contrasted with the increase in scores on the ACT exam,
the other primary college admissions test. This month, ACT reported its biggest
score increase in 20 years. The ACT also has a writing section, but it is
optional.
Seppy Basili, senior vice president at Kaplan Inc., the education and test
preparation company, said the new SAT test undoubtedly affected scores because
students were less familiar with it and because fewer students repeated it. But
Mr. Basili said he thought the length played a greater role than the College
Board acknowledged.
“It is not just that the test is 3 hours and 45 minutes,” he said. “It is that
the whole experience is five hours or more,” he said, factoring in things like
breaks.
Most states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, saw scores decline
in reading and math. In New York, average reading scores fell 4 points to 493
and math scores 1 point to 510. In Connecticut, reading was down 5 points to 512
and math 1 point to 516. In New Jersey, reading fell 7 points to 496 and math 2
points to 515.
In New York City, Joel I. Klein, the chancellor of the education department,
said, “My only reaction is, it shows that we have to continue to work harder.”
The number of students taking the SAT nationally fell slightly, by about 10,000
students, to just under 1.5 million, or about 48 percent of more than 3 million
students who graduated from high school this year.
At a time when many elite colleges have expressed interest in recruiting more
low-income students, the number of students from families earning $30,000 or
less who took the SAT fell by more than 13 percent, to 183,317, while the number
from families earning $100,000 or more rose 8 percent, to 225,869.
Mr. Camara said that of the information collected about students, the income
data was the least reliable. He said he did not know what accounted for the
decrease in low-income students taking the test.
Counselors in high schools where the SAT has long dominated, said more of their
students were taking the ACT. Some have said that in the wake of the College
Board’s disclosure this spring that it had mis-scored more than 5,000 exams,
they have urged their students to consider the ACT.
SAT Reading and
Math Scores Show a Significant Decline, NYT, 30.8.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/education/30sat.html?hp&ex=1156996800&en=645ef9b533220442&ei=5094&partner=homepage
U.S. Issues New Rules on Schools and Disability
August 4, 2006
the New York Times
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 — For more than 25 years, federal law
had required that schools nationwide identify children as learning disabled by
comparing their scores on intelligence tests with their academic achievement.
This meant that many students had to wait until third or fourth grade to get the
special education help they needed.
In regulations issued today after changes to the law, the federal Education
Department said states could not require school districts to rely on that
method, allowing districts to find other ways to determine which children are
eligible for extra help.
It was the final step in the federal government’s repudiation of the old
approach, which had come under severe criticism from advocates for children with
disabilities, testing experts and eventually federal officials themselves.
Advocates for those children applauded the change.
“If you talk to principals and special ed directors, there is pent-up demand for
better ways to serve struggling kids than waiting until they crash and burn in
third and fourth grade,’’ said James H. Wendorf, executive director of the
National Center for Learning Disabilities. The new rules also require schools to
alert parents as they begin exploring whether children may need special
education, another change that won praise from advocates for children with
disabilities.
The regulations come after Congress updated laws covering special education for
some six million schoolchildren nationwide in late 2004.
Comparing intelligence tests with academic achievement, known as the discrepancy
model, came under intense criticism in the debates over the law and over special
education.
Federal officials and advocates for children with disabilities contended that
the practice of waiting for children to fall behind on tests in third or fourth
grade before getting them extra help consigned them to failure, and opened the
way for the disproportionate numbers of poor and minority children to be labeled
as needing special education.
The 2004 law abandoned reliance on that approach. And the new regulations favor
alternative methods of identifying children who need services, like evaluating
the response of struggling children to extra help before the third grade.
The 2004 law also streamlined procedures and reduced the paperwork involved in
providing children special education services, and relaxed burdens on schools
when children with disabilities had behavioral problems.
A draft of the regulations published in June 2005 prompted an outpouring of
5,500 letters and comments to the Education Department from advocates for
children with disabilities, as well as parents, teachers’ unions, and state,
district and local education officials.
The department posted the final regulations on its Web site today, along with
answers to each of the comments it received. The final regulations will be
published in the Federal Register on Aug. 14, and will take effect 60 days
later.
In unveiling the new rules, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said her
priority was “that we not lose our vigilance for educational attainment for
every child.”
Advocates for children with disabilities said they were disappointed that the
regulations did not address some problems they saw in the 2004 federal law.
For example, the law says that instead of reviewing each disabled child’s
educational plan every year automatically, schools could review them only once
every three years, provided parents agree to the change. The regulations do not
help ensure parents are properly notified, advocates said.
“But who is going to make sure that parents now know what they’re giving up if
they agree to that?” said Ricki Sabia, associate director of the National Down
Syndrome Society Policy Center. “The department could have made clear what
constitutes that agreement.”
U.S. Issues New
Rules on Schools and Disability, NYT, 4.8.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/04/education/04education.html
Evolution Fight Shifts Direction in Kansas Vote
August 3, 2006
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY and RALPH BLUMENTHAL
TOPEKA, Kan., Aug. 2 — Less than a year after the Kansas
Board of Education adopted science standards that were the most wide-reaching in
the nation in challenging Darwin’s theory of evolution, voters on Tuesday ousted
the conservative majority on the board that favored those guidelines.
Several of the winners in the primary election, whose victories are virtually
certain to shift the board to at least a 6-to-4 moderate majority in November,
promised Wednesday to work swiftly to restore a science curriculum that does not
subject evolution to critical attack.
They also said they would try to eliminate restrictions on sex education passed
by the current board and to review the status of the education commissioner, Bob
Corkins, who they said was hired last year with little background in education.
In a state where a fierce fight over how much students should be taught about
the criticism of evolution has gone back and forth since 1999, the election
results were seen as a significant defeat for the movement of intelligent
design, which holds that nature by itself cannot account for life’s complexity.
Defenders of evolution pointed to the results in Kansas as a third major defeat
for the intelligent design movement across the country recently and a sign,
perhaps, that the public was beginning to pay attention to the movement’s
details and, they said, its failings.
“I think more citizens are learning what intelligent design really is and
realizing that they don’t really want that taught in their public schools,” said
Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education.
In February, Ohio’s board of education dropped a mandate that 10th-grade biology
classes include critical analysis of evolution. Last year, a federal judge ruled
that teaching intelligent design in the schools of Dover, Pa., was
unconstitutional. But Ms. Scott said that opponents of evolution were hardly
finished.
“They’ve had a series of setbacks,” she said, “but I don’t think for one moment
that this means the intelligent design people will fold their tents and go
away.”
Supporters of intelligent design and others who had favored the Kansas science
standards said they were disappointed in Tuesday’s outcome, but they said they
had also won a series of little-noticed victories in other states, including
South Carolina. There, supporters said, state officials decided this summer to
require students to look at ways that scientists use data “to investigate and
critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.”
John G. West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a group in the
forefront of the intelligent design movement, said any repeal of the science
standards would be a disservice to students here, and an effort to censor
legitimate scientific challenges to Darwin’s theories. Still, he said, no local
political skirmish will ultimately answer the broad issue.
“The debate over Darwin’s theory will be won or lost over the science,” he said.
It is not clear, however, that the Kansas vote necessarily reflected a
widespread change in thinking around the state. The overall turnout in Tuesday’s
election was 18 percent, the lowest here in at least 14 years, a fact some local
political experts attributed to low-key races statewide and painfully steamy
weather.
Several groups that favored the teaching of evolution had worked to turn out
moderate voters. The groups included the Kansas Alliance for Education, which
raised more than $100,000 to campaign against the current majority and the
science guidelines, and Kansas Citizens for Science.
If future school board elections turn out a different group of motivated voters,
the results could shift again, as they have in previous elections.
Five seats were at stake in Tuesday’s vote, four of them held by the board’s
conservative Republican majority. Two conservatives lost to moderates in the
Republican primary, ensuring a shift in control on the 10-member state board.
Both winners will face Democratic opponents in November, but the Democrats are
both considered moderates as well.
“We need to teach good science and bring the discussion back to educational
issues, and not continue focusing on hot-button issues,” said Jana Shaver, a
teacher and college trustee from Independence.
Ms. Shaver is one of the moderate winners in the Republican primary. She ran far
ahead of the conservative candidate, Brad Patzer, who was trying to claim the
seat of his mother-in-law, Iris Van Meter, who did not seek re-election.
Reached by telephone on Wednesday, Ms. Van Meter refused to speak to a reporter.
“I have nothing to say to you,” she said.
Connie Morris, a former teacher and author who had described evolution as “a
nice bedtime story,” also lost in the Republican primary, to Sally Cauble,
another teacher.
Ms. Cauble, a local school board member from Liberal, said she favored returning
to what she considered a more traditional science curriculum drawn up by a
committee of science experts.
The Kansas standards, which were to take effect in classrooms in 2007, do not
specifically require or prohibit discussion of intelligent design. They call for
students to learn about “the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory, but
also to learn about areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of
the theory.”
The guidelines also say that evolution “has no discernable direction or goal.”
Experts say that language goes beyond the general requirement for critical
analysis of evolution as adopted by some other states.
Some members of the state school board, who supported the guidelines and were
not up for election, seemed frustrated at the prospect that the board would once
again revisit the guidelines.
“If the liberals take over in January, which appears likely, then I am going to
have very little to say about it,” said Steve E. Abrams, the board chairman.
Kathy Martin, a board member and supporter of the standards, said: “I assume we
will go back over that stuff. I don’t see a need for it, but there you have it.”
Kansas has been over this ground before. In 1999, the state made national
headlines by stripping its curriculum of nearly any mention of evolution. Two
years later, voters removed several conservative board members, and the
curriculum change was reversed.
Then, a conservative majority took hold in 2004 and revived the issue, leading
to the bitter 6-to-4 vote last year, in which the board adopted the current
standards.
Monica Davey reported from Topeka for this article, and Ralph Blumenthal
from Houston.
Evolution Fight
Shifts Direction in Kansas Vote, NYT, 3.8.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/us/03evolution.html?hp&ex=1154664000&en=c43df5486e76b157&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Evolution Opponents Lose Kansas Board Majority
August 2, 2006
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Kansas voters on Tuesday handed power back to moderates on
the State Board of Education, setting the stage for a return of science teaching
that broadly accepts the theory of evolution, according to preliminary election
results.
With just 6 districts of 1,990 yet to report as of 8 a.m. Central time today,
two conservatives — including incumbent Connie Morris, a former west Kansas
teacher and author who had described evolution as “a nice bedtime story” —
appear to have been defeated decisively by two moderates in the Republican
primary elections. One moderate incumbent, Janet Waugh from the Kansas City
area, held on to her seat in the Democratic primary.
If her fellow moderates prevailed, Ms. Waugh said last week, “we need to revisit
the minutes and every decision that was 6-4, re-vote.”
Ms. Morris lost to Sally Cauble, a teacher from Liberal, who has favored a
return to traditional science standards.
Taking another seat from the conservatives in the Republican primary was Jana
Shaver of Independence, a former teacher and administrator, who ran far ahead of
Brad Patzer. Mr. Patzer is the son-in-law of the current board member Iris Van
Meter, who did not seek reelection.
In another closely fought Republican race, in the Kansas City-Olathe district,
Harry E. McDonald, a retired biology teacher, lost to the conservative incumbent
John W. Bacon, an accountant.
The results seem likely to give the moderates a 6-4 edge on the 10-member board
when it takes over in January. Half the members of the board are elected every
two years. The election results are not final until certified by the Kansas
Secretary of State, Ron Thornburgh, following an official canvas.
Both moderate Republican winners face Democratic opponents in November, but the
Democrats are moderates as well, favoring a return to the traditional science
standards that prevailed before a conservative majority elected in 2004 passed
new rules for teaching science. Those rules, enacted last November, called for
classroom critiques of Darwin’s theory. Ms. Waugh, the Democrat, does not face a
Republican opponent in the general election.
The changes in the science standards, favored by advocates of intelligent design
who believe life is too complex to be have been created by natural events, put
Kansas at the vanguard of efforts by religious advocates critical explanations
of the origin of life that do not include a creator. But intelligent design was
not referenced in the Kansas standards.
The curriculum changes, coming after years of see-sawing power struggles between
moderates and conservatives, drew widespread ridicule and, critics complained,
threatened Kansas’s high standing in national education circles. But Steve E.
Abrams, the chairman of the board and a veterinarian from Arkansas City, said
the changes only subjected evolution to critical scientific scrutiny.
Evolution
Opponents Lose Kansas Board Majority, NYT, 2.8.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/us/02cnd-kansas.html?hp&ex=1154577600&en=938d196883854b8d&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Mount a Counterattack
August 1, 2006
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
KANSAS CITY, Kan., July 29 — God and Charles Darwin are not
on the primary ballot in Kansas on Tuesday, but once again a contentious schools
election has religion and science at odds in a state that has restaged a
three-quarter-century battle over the teaching of evolution.
Less than a year after a conservative Republican majority on the State Board of
Education adopted rules for teaching science containing one of the broadest
challenges in the nation to Darwin’s theory of evolution, moderate Republicans
and Democrats are mounting a fierce counterattack. They want to retake power and
switch the standards back to what they call conventional science.
The Kansas election is being watched closely by both sides in the national
debate over the teaching of evolution. In the past several years, pitched
battles have been waged between the scientific establishment and proponents of
what is called intelligent design, which holds that nature alone cannot explain
life’s origin and complexity.
Last February, the Ohio Board of Education reversed its 2002 mandate requiring
10th-grade biology classes to critically analyze evolution. The action followed
a federal judge’s ruling that teaching intelligent design in the public schools
of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.
A defeat for the conservative majority in Kansas on Tuesday could be further
evidence of the fading fortunes of the intelligent design movement, while a
victory would preserve an important stronghold in Kansas.
The curriculum standards adopted by the education board do not specifically
mention intelligent design, but advocates of the belief lobbied for the changes,
and students are urged to seek “more adequate explanations of natural
phenomena.”
Though there is no reliable polling data available, Joseph Aistrup, head of
political science at Kansas State University, said sharp ideological splits
among Republicans and an unusual community of interest among moderate
Republicans and some Democrats were helping challengers in the primary.
Kansas Democrats, moreover, have a strong standard-bearer in the incumbent
governor, Kathleen Sebelius, who has distanced herself from the debate.
“And if a conservative candidate makes it through the primary, there’s a
Democratic challenger waiting” in the general election, Professor Aistrup said.
Several moderate Republican candidates have vowed, if they lose Tuesday, to
support the Democratic primary winners in November. With the campaign enlivened
by a crowded field of 16 candidates contending for five seats — four held by
conservatives who voted for the new science standards last year — a shift of two
seats could overturn the current 6-to-4 majority. The four-year terms are
staggered so that only half the 10-member board is up for election each two
years.
The acrimony in the school board races is not limited to differences over the
science curriculum but also over other ideologically charged issues like sex
education, charter schools and education financing. Power on the board has
shifted almost every election since 1998, with the current conservative majority
taking hold in 2004.
“Can we just agree God invented Darwin?” asked a weary Sue Gamble, a moderate
member of the board whose seat is not up for re-election.
The chairman of the board, Dr. Steve E. Abrams, a veterinarian and the leader of
the conservative majority, said few of the opposition candidates were really
moderates. “They’re liberals,” said Dr. Abrams, who is not up for re-election.
He said that the new science curriculum in no way opened the door to intelligent
design or creationism and that any claim to the contrary “is an absolute
falsehood.”
“We have explicitly stated that the standards must be based on scientific
evidence,” Dr. Abrams said, “what is observable, measurable, testable,
repeatable and unfalsifiable.”
In science, he said, “everything is supposedly tentative, except the teaching of
evolution is dogma.”
Harry E. McDonald, a retired biology teacher and self-described moderate
Republican who has been going door to door for votes in his district near
Olathe, said the board might have kept overt religious references out of the
standards, “but methinks they doth protest too much.”
“They say science can’t answer this, therefore God,” Mr. McDonald said.
Connie Morris, a conservative Republican running for re-election, said the board
had merely authorized scientifically valid criticism of evolution. Ms. Morris, a
retired teacher and author, said she did not believe in evolution.
“It’s a nice bedtime story,” she said. “Science doesn’t back it up.”
Dr. Abrams said his views as someone who believes that God created the universe
6,500 years ago had nothing to do with the science standards adopted.
“In my personal faith, yes, I am a creationist,” he said. “But that doesn’t have
anything to do with science. I can separate them.” He said he agreed that “my
personal views of Scripture have no room in the science classroom.”
Dr. Abrams said that at a community meeting he had been asked whether it was
possible to believe in the Bible and in evolution, and that he had responded,
“There are those who try to believe in both — there are theistic evolutionists —
but at some point in time you have to decide which you’re going to put your
credence in.”
Last year’s changes in the science standards followed an increasingly bitter
seesawing of power on the education board that began in 1998 when conservatives
won a majority. They made the first changes to the standards the next year,
which in turn were reversed after moderates won back control in 2000. The 2002
elections left the board split 5-5, and in 2004 the conservatives won again,
instituting their major standards revisions in November 2005.
Critics said the changes altered the science standards in ways that invited
theistic interpretations. The new definition called for students to learn about
“the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory, but also to learn about areas
where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of the theory.”
In one of many “additional specificities” that the board added to the standards,
it stated, “Biological evolution postulates an unguided natural process that has
no discernable direction or goal.”
John Calvert, manager of the Intelligent Design Network in Shawnee Mission and a
lawyer who wrote material for the board advocating the new science standards,
said they were not intended to advance religion.
“What we are trying to do is insert objectivity, take the bias out of the
religious standard that now favors the nontheistic religion of evolution,” Mr.
Calvert said.
Janet Waugh, a car dealer and the only moderate Democrat on the board whose seat
is up for election, said that just because some people were challenging
evolution did not mean their views belonged in the curriculum.
“When the mainstream scientific community determines a theory is correct, that’s
when it should be in the schools,” Ms. Waugh said. “The intelligent design
people are trying to cut in line.”
The races have been hard-fought. With the majority of the 100,000 registered
Republicans in Mr. McDonald’s northeast Kansas district usually ignoring primary
elections, a few hundred ballots could easily be the margin of victory.
So Mr. McDonald, who with $35,000 is the lead fund-raiser among the candidates,
printed newsletters showing his opponent, the conservative board member John W.
Bacon, with a big red slash through his face and the slogan, “Time to Bring Home
the Bacon.” Mr. Bacon did not respond to several calls for a response.
But many of the homeowners Mr. McDonald visited Friday night showed little
interest in the race. Jack Campbell, a medical center security director, opened
the door warily, and when Mr. McDonald recited his pitch, seemed disappointed.
“I thought I won some sweepstakes,” Mr. Campbell said.
Last Thursday night at Fort Hays State University, Ms. Morris debated her
moderate Republican challenger, Sally Cauble, a former teacher, and the
Democratic candidate, Tim Cruz, a former mayor of Garden City, whom Ms. Morris
once accused of being an illegal immigrant. (He said he was third-generation
American, and Ms. Morris apologized.)
The audience asked about Kansas being ridiculed across the country for its
stance on evolution.
“I did not write the jokes,” Ms. Morris said.
Spectators split on the winner.
“There are so many more important issues in Kansas right now,” said Cheryl
Shepherd-Adams, a science teacher. “The issue is definitely a wedge issue, and I
don’t want to see our community divided.”
Evolution’s
Backers in Kansas Mount a Counterattack, NYT, 1.8.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/us/01evolution.html?hp&ex=1154491200&en=bb3d3e73e4d597cd&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Our Lady of Discord
July 30, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN HANSEN
IT takes a singular sense of purpose to turn a
lone Michigan pizza joint into a multibillion-dollar global brand. Yet the
founder of Domino’s Pizza, Thomas S. Monaghan, certainly had it more four
decades ago, when he bought his first restaurant in Ypsilanti, Mich., near
Detroit — and he has brought that same sense of mission to the task of giving
his pizza fortune away.
Since netting about $1 billion from the 1998 sale of Domino’s to Bain Capital,
Mr. Monaghan, 69, has become one of the leading philanthropists in the country
and the biggest benefactor of conservative Catholic institutions.
In the past eight years, his Ave Maria Foundation, based in Ann Arbor, Mich.,
has donated $140 million to promote conservative Catholic education, media and
other organizations, including Detroit-area parochial grade schools, a law
school and small regional colleges in Michigan and Nicaragua, along with radio
stations and a fellowship group for Catholic business leaders.
His boldest charitable venture by far, however, is Ave Maria University, a
four-year liberal arts campus under construction 30 miles northeast of Naples,
Fla., to which Mr. Monaghan has donated or pledged $285 million so far. Along
with the university, which enrolled its first students three years ago on a
temporary campus, he and a local developer are building an adjoining new town
called Ave Maria.
The bar for the school has been set high, with plans to eventually attract up to
6,000 students to what supporters, including Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, predict
will be a top-tier academic institution devoted to the Catholic faith.
Mr. Monaghan, who has called the Florida campus and town “God’s will,” has even
loftier intentions. He has said that he sees the university, which says it
adheres to a strict interpretation of Catholic doctrine, as a chance to save
souls. “I’m a businessman. I get to the bottom line,” Mr. Monaghan, who declined
to be interviewed for this article, told The Orlando Sentinel in 2004. “And the
bottom line is to help people get to heaven.”
Yet as he aims for the divine, Mr. Monaghan has been facing some unexpected
earthly trials, including a revolt at his law school in Ann Arbor and sharp
criticism by many of the conservative Catholics who once supported his
foundation’s projects.
In many ways, Mr. Monaghan’s troubles illustrate how difficult it can be for
wealthy, driven entrepreneurs to make the transition to full-time philanthropy,
particularly when they have single-minded ideas about how they want their money
spent. Traits that make successful business leaders — ego, ambition,
determination, even a touch of imperiousness — do not necessarily go over well
in charitable work, causing even the most well-intentioned projects to founder.
As the legendary investor Warren E. Buffett recently noted when he donated most
of his $40 billion fortune to an established foundation rather than create one
of his own, making a mint — as difficult as that is — can be easier than giving
it away.
As he tries to build a new university and town in his own image, Mr. Monaghan
has been experiencing some of those difficulties firsthand. Faculty members,
students and parents tied to his Detroit-area schools have complained that he
runs his charitable foundation like a sole proprietorship, starting and
abandoning projects as whim strikes him. And they characterize his new Florida
university as a vanity venture that could well prove to be a colossal waste of
cash.
“It all belongs to Tom Monaghan; that’s the problem,” said Therese M. Bower of
Cincinnati, whose son attended Ave Maria College, one of the schools Mr.
Monaghan founded in Michigan. His foundation moved to close the school’s
Ypsilanti campus to focus on building his university in Florida.
“If Tom were a real philanthropist,” said Jay W. McNally, the former director of
communications and advancement at the college, “he would donate his money and
step off.” Mr. McNally said the school let him go after he told federal
officials that some financial aid for students in Michigan had been diverted to
Florida; Ave Maria University later returned $259,000 in federal money.Mr.
Monaghan’s many defenders, including Bowie K. Kuhn, the former baseball
commissioner, and Michael Novak, a Catholic theologian, dismissed much of the
criticism as carping by academics. “If it weren’t Monaghan, it would be
dissatisfaction with whomever,” says Mr. Novak, an Ave Maria University trustee.
Mr. Kuhn, who is on the board of the Ave Maria School of Law, said Mr. Monaghan
had every right to use his money as he wished. “Tom makes very good judgments,
and he sticks to his guns,” he said.
Mr. McNally, a former editor of the Detroit archdiocese’s newspaper, said he too
had admired Mr. Monaghan’s determination. Back in the 1980’s, Mr. McNally
recalled, he and other conservative Catholics cheered Mr. Monaghan’s donations
to anti-abortion causes and his refusal to withdraw that support even when
abortion-rights groups called for a boycott of Domino’s.
He and other conservative Catholics were equally enthusiastic when Mr.
Monaghan’s foundation began its push into higher education eight years ago,
starting Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti and the Ave Maria School of Law in
neighboring Ann Arbor, and taking over the administration of St. Mary’s College
in nearby Orchard Lake, Mich.
Many Detroit-area Catholics said they gave up jobs and teaching posts elsewhere
to work at the schools, with some faculty members moving from hundreds of miles
away because, as a former Ave Maria College biology professor, Andrew J.
Messaros, recalled, they were committed to promoting a faithful version of core
Catholic teachings.
“I bought into the whole vision lock, stock and barrel,” Professor Messaros
said. He added that he took a $16,000 pay cut from a tenure-track position at
the West Virginia University School of Medicine to teach at Ave Maria in
mid-2003.
Mr. Monaghan had considered building Ave Maria University, along with a 250-foot
crucifix, in Ann Arbor Township, but local officials denied him the necessary
zoning changes in 2002. That fall, he announced that the Barron Collier Company,
a Florida developer, had donated 750 acres of farmland to the university on the
northwest edge of the Everglades. His new plan was to build Ave Maria University
in Florida, while investing another $50 million in a separate partnership with
Barron Collier to build the adjoining Ave Maria town.
NICHOLAS J. HEALY JR., who was president of Ave Maria College in Michigan and is
now president of the Florida university, promptly set up a temporary campus near
Naples. It opened with about 100 students in a retirement complex in fall 2003;
enrollment has grown to nearly 400 students.
“We’ve tried to create an environment traditional Catholics can be comfortable
with,” Mr. Healy said, adding that the devotion to the faith was put into action
in many ways: from single-sex dorms and daily rosary walks to a scholarship that
the school, in keeping with what it describes as its strong pro-life ethic,
recently began offering in the name of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida
woman whose husband won a bitter court fight in 2004 to authorize doctors to
stop life support.
While Mr. Healy was opening the Florida university, financing for Mr. Monaghan’s
projects in Michigan began to disappear. In late 2002, the foundation said it
would no longer support St. Mary’s. An expected shutdown of the school was
averted only when another Catholic institution, Madonna University in nearby
Livonia, Mich., agreed to take it over.
In Ypsilanti, the news that Ave Maria College would be merged into the new
university in Florida went down a little easier — at least initially — given
that Mr. Monaghan pledged to keep the Michigan campus open until 2007, so that
the school’s 230 students could stay and finish their degrees.
Despite that assurance, however, Professor Messaros said that by the fall of
2003 school officials were pressuring him and other faculty members to move to
Florida quickly — or risk losing their jobs. “Their attitude was, ‘This is what
we’re going to do. Take it or leave it,’ ” he said.
Mrs. Bower, whose son Paul was a junior at Ave Maria College when the move to
Florida began to accelerate, said she became concerned that the Michigan campus
was being deserted. She grew more anxious in 2004 when word got out that school
administrators in Florida had tried to have most of the books at the Michigan
campus’s library shipped to Naples.
“I thought, ‘Wait! There are still students there. They can’t just take all the
stuff,’ ” said Mrs. Bower, who created a Web site — geocities.com/aveparents —
to help keep the Michigan campus intact.
Another parent — Edward N. Peters, who taught canon law in a theology program
now based at Ave Maria University — threatened to sue if the campus was
dismantled.
“It has become clear that Tom Monaghan regards Ave Maria not as a kind of public
trust but rather as his personal domain which he can effectively treat however
he wants,” Professor Peters, whose son attended the college, wrote in a June
2004 letter to the college board. He added that since Mr. Monaghan shifted his
attention to Florida, he had cut support for several of his Michigan projects,
including a weekly Catholic newspaper and a new convent. “Ironically, the very
legacy that was being built up with Monaghan’s help is now being torn down at
his will,” Professor Peters wrote. “It is a tragic and scandalous waste of the
human and financial resources given by God.”
In late 2004, Father Neil J. Roy, Ave Maria College’s academic dean, actually
did sue Mr. Monaghan and the school’s trustees in a bid to stall the Michigan
campus’s closure, but a state court judge dismissed the suit last September. The
exodus of faculty and students to Florida and elsewhere continued, and last year
school officials began making cash buyout offers to the 30 or so students who
had planned to continue studies on the Ypsilanti campus in 2007.
Paul R. Roney, executive director of Mr. Monaghan’s foundation, said he
understood that the decision to shift resources to Florida was difficult for
some in Ypsilanti to accept. But he added that Mr. Monaghan had honored his
promise to keep the campus operating through 2007 — albeit now with just three
students and a handful of professors. “Any pledges that were made have been more
than fulfilled,” Mr. Roney said.
Despite all the criticism, Mr. Healy, Ave Maria University’s president, said
that most professors in Michigan happily relocated to Florida.
For a while, the Ave Maria School of Law seemed immune to the strife. Its
enrollment, now about 380, was growing, and the American Bar Association had
granted it full accreditation. But Mr. Monaghan wants to relocate that school to
Florida, too, upsetting teachers, students and alumni. Opponents say it is crazy
to leave an intellectual center like Ann Arbor, home of the University of
Michigan, for an undeveloped outpost on the edge of the Everglades.
“There’s nothing there yet, with all due respect,” said Chris McGowan, a law
school alumnus who noted that students in Ann Arbor have easy access to a
federal courthouse and many local internship opportunities.
He and others who are fighting the move said the only reason the school’s board
was even considering it was that Mr. Monaghan, the chairman, had invested more
than $330 million in the Florida university and town and wanted the law school
there to shore up that investment.
One veteran board member — Charles E. Rice, an emeritus professor of law at
Notre Dame University — tried to make the case against the move. But he said
that Mr. Monaghan and other board members, including the law school’s dean,
Bernard Dobranski, “did not want a contrary voice,” so last fall they adopted
term-limit bylaws and ejected him from the board.
Dean Dobranski denied the bylaws change was directed at Professor Rice, noting
that three other members left the board at the same time.
Faculty members, students and alumni rallied around Professor Rice, however, and
since last fall they have mounted a campaign that has included pointed attacks
against Mr. Monaghan and resolutions calling on Dean Dobranski to resign.
“The bigger issue is school governance,” said Jason B. Negri, president of the
law school’s alumni association. Specifically, he criticized Mr. Monaghan’s
insistence on operating the school like a private business and what he said was
the board’s failure to stand up to him.
MR. KUHN rejected that criticism. “This is not a bunch of trained dogs,” he said
of his fellow directors, adding that the board would not make any decision on
relocating the law school to Florida until a feasibility study on the move was
completed and members had seen the results.
“The key question is where we will thrive in the long term,” said Dean
Dobranski. He pointed out that Mr. Monaghan had given the law school $50
million, so “it’s not unreasonable for him to say ‘I think the move is a good
idea.’ ” Dean Dobranski added, “He’s to be commended for how he’s used his
wealth.”
At the university’s construction site in Florida, the fruits of Mr. Monaghan’s
generosity are coming into view. Miles of pipes and electricity lines have been
laid, and buildings are going up. Mr. Healy, the president, said the school
should be out of its temporary home and on the new campus by August 2007.
Not that the process has been easy — or cheap. Mr. Healy said damage from
hurricanes last year and the year before, along with strong demand for raw
materials in China has sent labor, cement and steel prices soaring — nearly
doubling building costs and eating up Mr. Monaghan’s money faster than expected.
Indeed, in the next year, Mr. Roney said, the Ave Maria Foundation’s assets
might drop to as little as $15 million from $251 million in 1999.
As a result, school officials have had to scale back plans. For now, they have
settled for putting up only about half of the 14 buildings they originally
intended to complete in the first phase of campus construction. Mr. Healy is
counting on more money from Mr. Monaghan as houses are sold in the adjoining
town, because Mr. Monaghan has promised to donate his share of profits, expected
to exceed $100 million, to the university. “Very few schools have this kind of
start-up capital,” Mr. Healy said.
But it could be several years or more before the university sees much of that
cash, given that home sales will not start until later this year, amid a cooling
housing market, and the whole town — which has been planned to include 11,000
homes, a retail district and an 18-hole golf course — will not be completed
until around 2015.
IN the meantime, Mr. Novak, the Ave Maria trustee, said the university would
have to raise millions of dollars to cover salaries and other operating expenses
and to keep construction, expected to cost at least $1 billion over the next 50
years, moving forward. The school has raised about $20 million in the last three
years and is now expanding efforts to sell “naming opportunities” for campus
buildings. Mr. Novak said he was hopeful that that initiative would attract some
major donors, but he added, “until you actually get them in the door you don’t
have them.”
Kate Cousino, the 2004 salutatorian of Ave Maria College, said she would not be
writing any checks. In fact, she said that she and other Ave Maria graduates
recently started an alternative alumni group because they didn’t want
fund-raisers for the Florida campus asking them for donations.
She and other critics of Mr. Monaghan say that other like-minded Catholics will
hesitate to hand over money now that, at least in conservative Catholic circles,
word of his troubles has gotten out. “I think he’s really turned off a lot of
his target market,” said Terrence L. McKeegan, an Ave Maria law school graduate.
Mr. McKeegan, who now works for a human-rights group at Franciscan University of
Steubenville in Ohio, said recent fund-raising letters suggested that the
university may be facing a cash crunch. One letter signed by Mr. Monaghan, for
example, said that steeper construction costs had hampered the university’s
ability to buy books for its library, and urgently appealed for donations. Mr.
McKeegan and others predicted that the university would wind up amounting to far
less than the first-rate institution Mr. Monaghan has envisioned in spite of all
the money he has put into it.
Professor Messaros called the millions that Mr. Monaghan has spent
“mind-numbing.” His fortune could have been spent helping the poor or assisting
established universities or on any number of better causes, instead of on
building what he called “a ‘Citizen Kane’ monument to waste,” Professor Messaros
added.
Mr. Healy, the university president, and Mr. Novak, the trustee, denied that
that the controversy had hurt fund-raising efforts. “We haven’t seen any decline
in our support at all,” Mr. Healy said, adding that the extra attention could
even help. “The more publicity there is,” he said, “the better off you are.”
Mr. Novak said that many of the difficulties Mr. Monaghan and university
officials have faced are not surprising. “All good things are fraught with
troubles,” he said. “You just have to work through them.” The school already has
a standout theology program, a strong sacred music program and a devoted student
body, he said. He said he had faith the university would thrive over time.
“I feel very strongly,” Mr. Novak said, “that this is something the Lord wants.”
Our
Lady of Discord, NYT, 30.7.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/business/yourmoney/30monaghan.html
Families Challenging Religious Influence in Delaware
Schools
July 29, 2006
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE
GEORGETOWN, Del. — After her family moved to this small
town 30 years ago, Mona Dobrich grew up as the only Jew in school. Mrs. Dobrich,
39, married a local man, bought the house behind her parents’ home and brought
up her two children as Jews.
For years, she and her daughter, Samantha, listened to Christian prayers at
public school potlucks, award dinners and parent-teacher group meetings, she
said. But at Samantha’s high school graduation in June 2004, a minister’s prayer
proclaiming Jesus as the only way to the truth nudged Mrs. Dobrich to act.
“It was as if no matter how much hard work, no matter how good a person you are,
the only way you’ll ever be anything is through Jesus Christ,” Mrs. Dobrich
said. “He said those words, and I saw Sam’s head snap and her start looking
around, like, ‘Where’s my mom? Where’s my mom?’ And all I wanted to do was run
up and take her in my arms.”
After the graduation, Mrs. Dobrich asked the Indian River district school board
to consider prayers that were more generic and, she said, less exclusionary. As
news of her request spread, many local Christians saw it as an effort to limit
their free exercise of religion, residents said. Anger spilled on to talk radio,
in letters to the editor and at school board meetings attended by hundreds of
people carrying signs praising Jesus.
“What people here are saying is, ‘Stop interfering with our traditions, stop
interfering with our faith and leave our country the way we knew it to be,’ ”
said Dan Gaffney, a host at WGMD, a talk radio station in Rehoboth, and a
supporter of prayer in the school district.
After receiving several threats, Mrs. Dobrich took her son, Alex, to Wilmington
in the fall of 2004, planning to stay until the controversy blew over. It never
has.
The Dobriches eventually sued the Indian River School District, challenging what
they asserted was the pervasiveness of religion in the schools and seeking
financial damages. They have been joined by “the Does,” a family still in the
school district who have remained anonymous because of the response against the
Dobriches.
Meanwhile, a Muslim family in another school district here in Sussex County has
filed suit, alleging proselytizing in the schools and the harassment of their
daughters.
The move to Wilmington, the Dobriches said, wrecked them financially, leading
them to sell their house and their daughter to drop out of Columbia University.
The dispute here underscores the rising tensions over religion in public
schools.
“We don’t have data on the number of lawsuits, but anecdotally, people think it
has never been so active — the degree to which these conflicts erupt in schools
and the degree to which they are litigated,” said Tom Hutton, a staff lawyer at
the National School Boards Association.
More religion probably exists in schools now than in decades because of the role
religious conservatives play in politics and the passage of certain education
laws over the last 25 years, including the Equal Access Act in 1984, said
Charles C. Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, a research and
education group.
“There are communities largely of one faith, and despite all the court rulings
and Supreme Court decisions, they continue to promote one faith,” Mr. Haynes
said. “They don’t much care what the minority complains about. They’re just
convinced that what they are doing is good for kids and what America is all
about.”
Dr. Donald G. Hattier, a member of the Indian River school board, said the
district had changed many policies in response to Mrs. Dobrich’s initial
complaints. But the board unanimously rejected a proposed settlement of the
Dobriches’ lawsuit.
“There were a couple of provisions that were unacceptable to the board,” said
Jason Gosselin, a lawyer for the board. “The parties are working in good faith
to move closer to settlement.”
Until recently, it was safe to assume that everyone in the Indian River district
was Christian, said the Rev. Mark Harris, an Episcopal priest at St. Peter’s
Church in Lewes.
But much has changed in Sussex County over the last 30 years. The county, in
southern Delaware, has resort enclaves like Rehoboth Beach, to which outsiders
bring their cash and, often, liberal values. Inland, in the area of Georgetown,
the county seat, the land is still a lush patchwork of corn and soybean fields,
with a few poultry plants. But developers are turning more fields into tracts of
rambling homes. The Hispanic population is booming. There are enough Reform
Jews, Muslims and Quakers to set up their own centers and groups, Mr. Harris
said.
In interviews with a dozen people here and comments on the radio by a half-dozen
others, the overwhelming majority insisted, usually politely, that prayer should
stay in the schools.
“We have a way of doing things here, and it’s not going to change to accommodate
a very small minority,’’ said Kenneth R. Stevens, 41, a businessman sitting in
the Georgetown Diner. “If they feel singled out, they should find another school
or excuse themselves from those functions. It’s our way of life.”
The Dobrich and Doe legal complaint portrays a district in which children were
given special privileges for being in Bible club, Bibles were distributed in
2003 at an elementary school, Christian prayer was routine at school functions
and teachers evangelized.
“Because Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, I will speak out for him,” said the
Rev. Jerry Fike of Mount Olivet Brethren Church, who gave the prayer at
Samantha’s graduation. “The Bible encourages that.” Mr. Fike continued:
“Ultimately, he is the one I have to please. If doing that places me at odds
with the law of the land, I still have to follow him.”
Mrs. Dobrich, who is Orthodox, said that when she was a girl, Christians here
had treated her faith with respectful interest. Now, she said, her son was
ridiculed in school for wearing his yarmulke. She described a classmate of his
drawing a picture of a pathway to heaven for everyone except “Alex the Jew.”
Mrs. Dobrich’s decision to leave her hometown and seek legal help came after a
school board meeting in August 2004 on the issue of prayer. Dr. Hattier had
called WGMD to discuss the issue, and Mr. Gaffney and others encouraged people
to go the meeting. Hundreds showed up.
A homemaker active in her children’s schools, Mrs. Dobrich said she had asked
the board to develop policies that would leave no one feeling excluded because
of faith. People booed and rattled signs that read “Jesus Saves,” she recalled.
Her son had written a short statement, but he felt so intimidated that his
sister read it for him. In his statement, Alex, who was 11 then, said: “I feel
bad when kids in my class call me ‘Jew boy.’ I do not want to move away from the
house I have lived in forever.”
Later, another speaker turned to Mrs. Dobrich and said, according to several
witnesses, “If you want people to stop calling him ‘Jew boy,’ you tell him to
give his heart to Jesus.”
Immediately afterward, the Dobriches got threatening phone calls. Samantha had
enrolled in Columbia, and Mrs. Dobrich decided to go to Wilmington temporarily.
But the controversy simmered, keeping Mrs. Dobrich and Alex away. The cost of
renting an apartment in Wilmington led the Dobriches to sell their home here.
Mrs. Dobrich’s husband, Marco, a school bus driver and transportation
coordinator, makes about $30,000 a year and has stayed in town to care for Mrs.
Dobrich’s ailing parents. Mr. Dobrich declined to comment. Samantha left
Columbia because of the financial strain.
The only thing to flourish, Mrs. Dobrich said, was her faith. Her children, she
said, “have so much pride in their religion now.”
“Alex wears his yarmulke all the time. He never takes it off.”
Families
Challenging Religious Influence in Delaware Schools, NYT, 29.7.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/us/29delaware.html
Most States Fail Demands Set Out in Education Law
July 25, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON
Most states failed to meet federal requirements that all
teachers be “highly qualified” in core teaching fields and that state programs
for testing students be up to standards by the end of the past school year,
according to the federal government.
The deadline was set by the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush’s effort to
make all American students proficient in reading and math by 2014. But the
Education Department found that no state had met the deadline for qualified
teachers, and it gave only 10 states full approval of their testing systems.
Faced with such findings, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who took
office promising flexible enforcement of the law, has toughened her stance,
leaving several states in danger of losing parts of their federal aid.
In the past few weeks, Ms. Spellings has flatly rejected as inadequate the
testing systems in Maine and Nebraska. She has also said that nine states are so
far behind in providing highly qualified teachers that they may face sanctions,
and she has accused California of failing to provide federally required
alternatives to troubled schools. California could be fined as much as $4.25
million.
The potential fines are far higher than any the Education Department has levied
over the law, and officials in several states, already upset with many of the
law’s provisions, have privately expressed further anger over the threat of
fines. But Ms. Spellings faces pressure for firm enforcement of the law from a
broad array of groups, including corporations and civil rights organizations.
“In the early part of her tenure, Secretary Spellings seemed more interested in
finding reasons to waive the law’s requirements than to enforce them,” said
Clint Bolick, president of the Alliance for School Choice, a group based in
Phoenix that supports vigorous enforcement of provisions that give students the
right to transfer from failing schools. “More recently, she seems intent on
holding states’ feet to the fire.”
In an interview, Ms. Spellings acknowledged her shift in emphasis.
“I want states to know that Congress and the president mean business on the
law,” she said. She has stressed that message in part, she said, because the
deadlines, which expired this month, were not met, and because lawmakers have
been asking her whether states are meeting the law’s requirements.
“I’m enforcing the law — does that make me tough?” she said. “Last year it was,
‘We’re marching together toward the deadline,’ but now it’s time for, ‘Your
homework is due.’ ”
Douglas D. Christensen, the Nebraska education commissioner, has accused Ms.
Spellings and her subordinates of treating Nebraska in a “mean-spirited,
arbitrary and heavy-handed way” after their announcement on June 30 that the
state’s testing system was “nonapproved” and that they intended to withhold
$127,000 in federal money.
In an interview in Lincoln, Neb., Mr. Christensen said he first realized the
administration’s attitude had changed in April, when Raymond Simon, deputy
education secretary, addressed most of the 50 state school superintendents at a
gathering in Washington.
“Ray went on a 12-minute diatribe of ‘You folks just ain’t getting it done’ and
said the department would be strictly interpreting the law from here on,” Mr.
Christensen said.
Mr. Simon disputed that account — “I’m not a diatribe type of guy,” he said —
but acknowledged that he had spoken bluntly.
“I tried to emphasize that we continue to be partners,” Mr. Simon said, “but
that there are some things we cannot be flexible on.”
Mr. Bush signed the act into law in January 2002. Under his first education
secretary, Rod Paige, legislators, educators and teachers unions criticized the
law’s many rules and what they said was its overemphasis on standardized
testing.
After Ms. Spellings took office in January 2005, she allowed some states to
renegotiate the ways they enforced the law, and on major issues she offered ways
to comply that prevented thousands of schools from being designated as failing.
Her efforts softened the outcry from states. But they brought criticism from
corporate executives who hoped the law would shake up schools to protect
American competitiveness. Criticism also came from civil rights groups that
wanted the law to eliminate educational disparities between whites and
minorities, and from groups angry that although the law required districts to
help students in failing schools transfer out, only 1 percent of eligible
students had done so.
Some experts say most parents do not want to remove children from neighborhood
schools. But others say districts have subverted the program, partly by
informing parents about their options too late.
Mr. Bolick’s group, the Alliance for School Choice, used a similar argument in a
complaint filed this year against the Los Angeles Unified School District, where
250,000 students were eligible for transfers in 2005-6, but only about 500
successfully transferred. That complaint generated considerable news coverage
and moved Ms. Spellings to action.
On May 15, she wrote every state, linking the “unacceptably low” participation
in transfer programs to the “poor and uneven quality” of many districts’
implementation. “We are prepared to take significant enforcement action,” she
said.
At the California Department of Education, Diane Levin, the state’s No Child
Left Behind administrator, said she had assumed that California was on solid
ground because a federal review of its enforcement of the law was ending
positively.
But then California received a letter from Ms. Spellings’s office demanding
extensive new documentation by Aug. 15 on the transfer programs in the state’s
20 largest districts. Officials warned California that if the documentation
proved inadequate, the government would withhold part of the $700 million the
state was to receive this fall for high-poverty schools, said Ms. Spellings’s
spokesman, Kevin Sullivan.
Ms. Levin said California felt whipsawed. “We’re doing everything the law asks
us to do,” she said, “which in a state this size is a huge amount of work, and
we’re treated like we’re doing nothing.”
Dozens of other states have also felt the tougher enforcement.
In May, federal officials ruled that nine states were so far from meeting the
teacher qualification provision that they could lose federal money. Ms.
Spellings said she would decide on the penalties after August, when states must
outline plans for getting 100 percent of teachers qualified.
At the end of June, Henry L. Johnson, an assistant secretary of education, wrote
to 34 states, including New York and New Jersey, saying that their tests had
major problems and that they must provide new documentation during a period of
mandatory oversight.
Dr. Johnson warned some states that federal money might be withheld. And he
rejected the testing programs in Maine and Nebraska. His letter to Maine said
$114,000 would be withheld unless the state could change Washington’s mind.
Nebraska is the only state allowed to meet the testing requirements with
separate exams written by teachers in its 250 districts rather than with one
statewide test.
Dr. Johnson’s letter to Nebraska said that although locally written tests were
permissible, the state had not shown it was holding all districts to a high
standard.
Before announcing that decision, Dr. Johnson visited the Papillion-La Vista
School District, south of Omaha.
Harlan H. Metschke, Papillion’s superintendent, said he had told Mr. Johnson
that Nebraska’s tests helped teachers focus on students’ learning needs, unlike
standardized tests, which compared students from one school with another.
“But federal officials have the mentality that there has to be one state test,”
Mr. Metschke said.
Most States Fail
Demands Set Out in Education Law, NYT, 25.7.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/education/25child.html?hp&ex=1153886400&en=714139991b389efa&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Feeling Strains, Baptist Colleges Cut Church Ties
July 22, 2006
The New York Times
By ALAN FINDER
GEORGETOWN, Ky. — The request seemed simple enough to the
Rev. Hershael W. York, then the president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. He
asked Georgetown College, a small Baptist liberal arts institution here, to
consider hiring for its religion department someone who would teach a literal
interpretation of the Bible.
But to William H. Crouch Jr., the president of Georgetown, it was among the last
straws in a struggle that had involved issues like who could be on the board of
trustees and whether the college encouraged enough freedom of inquiry to qualify
for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
Dr. Crouch and his trustees decided it was time to end the college’s 63-year
affiliation with the religious denomination. “From my point of view, it was
about academic freedom,’’ Dr. Crouch said. “I sat for 25 years and watched my
denomination become much more narrow and, in terms of education, much more
interested in indoctrination.’’
Georgetown is among a half-dozen colleges and universities whose ties with state
Baptist conventions have been severed in the last four years, part of a broad
realignment in which more than a dozen Southern Baptist universities, including
Wake Forest and Furman, have ended affiliations over the last two decades.
Georgetown’s parting was ultimately amicable. But many have been tense, even
bitter.
In Georgia and Missouri, disputes over who controls the boards of Baptist
colleges led to prolonged litigation. In Tennessee, a clash over whether Belmont
University in Nashville could appoint non-Baptists to its board led the
Tennessee Baptist Convention to vote in May to remove the entire board.
Belmont’s trustees are still running the university, and while negotiations are
continuing, the battle for control could end up in court.
“The future of Baptist higher education has rarely been more fragile,’’ R. Kirby
Godsey, the former president of Mercer University in Macon, Ga., said in a
speech in Atlanta in June. The Georgia Baptist Convention voted last November to
sever ties with Mercer.
The issues vary from state to state. But many Southern Baptist colleges and
their state conventions have been battling over money, control of boards of
trustees, whether the Bible must be interpreted literally, how evolution is
taught, the propriety of some books for college courses and of some plays for
campus performances and whether cultural and religious diversity should be
encouraged.
At the root of the conflicts is the question of how much the colleges should
reflect the views of their denomination. They are part of the continuing battle
among Southern Baptists for control of their church’s institutions.
More than 20 years ago, theological and cultural conservatives gained control
over moderates in the Southern Baptist Convention, the denomination’s broadest
body, representing more than 16 million worshipers. Similar shifts then occurred
in many, but not all, state Baptist conventions, which have considerable
independence.
The struggle has continued. Last month, the Southern Baptist Convention elected
a president who promised to be “a big-tent conservative” and defeated candidates
supported by the convention’s establishment.
Southern Baptist colleges are affiliated with the state conventions, and it does
not make sense to many members of the conventions to provide significant annual
subsidies to Baptist colleges that they view as out of tune with conservative
positions on central religious tenets, including how to interpret the Bible. “I
did feel that Georgetown was not on the same page as most Kentucky Baptists,’’
said Dr. York, who was president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention last year.
But efforts to rein in what many Southern Baptists see as inappropriate
departures from religious orthodoxy have looked to many professors and college
administrators like efforts to limit academic freedom.
“The convention itself in its national and state organizations has moved so far
to the right that previous diversity on the faculty and among the trustees is no
longer possible,’’ said Bill Leonard, dean of the Divinity School at Wake
Forest. “More theological control of the curriculum and the faculty has been the
result.’’
David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology at
Emory, put it more starkly. “The real underlying issue is that fundamentalism in
the Southern Baptist form is incompatible with higher education,’’ Professor Key
said. “In fundamentalism, you have all the truths. In education, you’re
searching for truths.’’
The state conventions do not own the colleges, but in most cases they approve
trustees and provide annual subsidies. Their power over the boards has often
been at the center of contention, with the stakes often involving academic
direction.
“We don’t want to cut our ties,’’ said R. Alton Lacey, president of Missouri
Baptist University, which has been fighting the Missouri Baptist Convention in
court since 2002 over who controls the university’s board. “We just don’t want
the conventions politicizing our boards.’’
The Georgia Baptist Convention’s severing of ties with Mercer University
followed an unsuccessful effort by the state convention, which did not have the
authority to appoint the university’s trustees, to gain that power. Many Baptist
leaders were also troubled by a forum at Mercer on issues affecting gay men and
lesbians, Dr. Godsey, the university’s former president, said.
Officials at Georgetown had long been concerned that differences with state
Baptists might become irreconcilable. In 1987, college officials negotiated an
agreement with state Baptist leaders that allowed either side to end the
affiliation, with four years’ notice. Both sides said that they had wanted to
continue the relationship, but that the strains had recently become acute.
Georgetown asked the Kentucky Baptist Convention two years ago to allow 25
percent of the college’s trustees to be non-Baptist, but the proposal was
rejected. Only about half of Georgetown’s students are Baptist, and less than
half of the alumni are Baptist, Dr. Crouch, the college’s president, said.
“I realized that our fund-raising depended on getting non-Baptists on our
board,’’ Dr. Crouch said.
Then, a year ago, the Kentucky convention turned down a nominee for Georgetown’s
board for the first time. Around the same time, Dr. York asked the college to
look for a religion professor who would teach theologically conservative
positions.
“You ought to have some professor on your faculty who believes Adam and Eve were
the first humans, that they actually existed,’’ Dr. York said.
Dr. Crouch and Georgetown’s trustees decided it was time to exercise their
escape clause. The college and the convention wanted to avoid the kind of
contention becoming common in neighboring states.
“I think the fear was that I was going to lead a kind of takeover,’’ said Dr.
York, a professor and associate dean at the Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary in Louisville. “But I’m only going to fight a battle that I can win and
that I want to win.’’
Kentucky convention delegates voted overwhelmingly in November to approve a
separation; the group agreed to phase out its $1.4 million annual contribution
to Georgetown over four years, and the college became self-governing.
Dr. Crouch noted that some Baptist universities that severed ties with state
conventions in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s have become essentially secular.
He hopes that will not happen at Georgetown.
“We call ourselves a Christian college grounded in historic Baptist
principles,’’ he said.
Georgetown continues to pursue serious academic ambitions, like pursuing a
chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the college honor society. Only 270 colleges and
universities have Phi Beta Kappa chapters, and there are rigorous standards for
new ones. Among the most important requirements are freedom of inquiry and
expression on campus, along with respect for religious, ethnic and racial
diversity.
A Georgetown requirement that tenured professors be Christian could pose
problems with the honor society. The college must also improve on a number of
specific standards, including increasing the number of books in its library and
reducing professors’ course loads. Phi Beta Kappa considers applications over a
three-year cycle, and Dr. Crouch hopes Georgetown will be ready to reapply in
2009.
“Phi Beta Kappa is the gold standard,’’ said Rosemary Allen, the Georgetown
provost.
Some of the few students on campus this summer said they supported Georgetown’s
decision to become independent and to improve its academic standing, although
they acknowledged they had not followed events closely.
“It’s good to go to a college that’s religious, but it doesn’t really matter to
me,’’ said John Sadlon, a sophomore. “What matters to me is getting my
education.’’
Feeling Strains,
Baptist Colleges Cut Church Ties, NYT, 22.7.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/education/22baptist.html?hp&ex=1153627200&en=6d7fde21bc163e72&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones in Study
July 15, 2006
The New Yorrk Times
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
WASHINGTON, July 14 — The Education Department reported on
Friday that children in public schools generally performed as well or better in
reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools. The
exception was in eighth-grade reading, where the private school counterparts
fared better.
The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores in
2003 from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools, found
that fourth graders attending public school did significantly better in math
than comparable fourth graders in private schools. Additionally, it found that
students in conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind their
counterparts in public schools on eighth-grade math.
The study, carrying the imprimatur of the National Center for Education
Statistics, part of the Education Department, was contracted to the Educational
Testing Service and delivered to the department last year.
It went through a lengthy peer review and includes an extended section of
caveats about its limitations and calling such a comparison of public and
private schools “of modest utility.”
Its release, on a summer Friday, was made with without a news conference or
comment from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.
Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the union for
millions of teachers, said the findings showed that public schools were “doing
an outstanding job” and that if the results had been favorable to private
schools, “there would have been press conferences and glowing statements about
private schools.”
“The administration has been giving public schools a beating since the
beginning” to advance its political agenda, Mr. Weaver said, of promoting
charter schools and taxpayer-financed vouchers for private schools as
alternatives to failing traditional public schools.
A spokesman for the Education Department, Chad Colby, offered no praise for
public schools and said he did not expect the findings to influence policy. Mr.
Colby emphasized the caveat, “An overall comparison of the two types of schools
is of modest utility.”
“We’re not just for public schools or private schools,’’ he said. “We’re for
good schools.”
The report mirrors and expands on similar findings this year by Christopher and
Sarah Theule Lubienski, a husband-and-wife team at the University of Illinois
who examined just math scores. The new study looked at reading scores, too.
The study, along with one of charter schools, was commissioned by the former
head of the national Center for Education Statistics, Robert Lerner, an
appointee of President Bush, at a time preliminary data suggested that charter
schools, which are given public money but are run by private groups, fared no
better at educating children than traditional public schools.
Proponents of charter schools had said the data did not take into account the
predominance of children in their schools who had already had problems in
neighborhood schools.
The two new studies put test scores in context by studying the children’s
backgrounds and taking into account factors like race, ethnicity, income and
parents’ educational backgrounds to make the comparisons more meaningful. The
extended study of charter schools has not been released.
Findings favorable to private schools would likely have given a lift to
administration efforts to offer children in ailing public schools the option of
attending private schools.
An Education Department official who insisted on anonymity because of the
climate surrounding the report, said researchers were "extra cautious" in
reviewing it and were aware of its “political sensitivity.”
The official said the warning against drawing unsupported conclusions was
expanded somewhat as the report went through in the review.
The report cautions, for example, against concluding that children do better
because of the type of school as opposed to unknown factors. It also warns of
great variations of performance among private schools, making a blanket
comparison of public and private schools “of modest utility.” And the scores on
which its findings are based reflect only a snapshot of student performance at a
point in time and say nothing about individual student progress in different
settings.
Arnold Goldstein of the National Center for Education Statistics said that the
review was meticulous, but that it was not unusual for the center.
Mr. Goldstein said there was no political pressure to alter the findings.
Students in private schools typically score higher than those in public schools,
a finding confirmed in the study. The report then dug deeper to compare students
of like racial, economic and social backgrounds. When it did that, the private
school advantage disappeared in all areas except eighth-grade reading.
And in math, 4th graders attending public school were nearly half a year ahead
of comparable students in private school, according to the report.
The report separated private schools by type and found that among private school
students, those in Lutheran schools performed best, while those in conservative
Christian schools did worst.
In eighth-grade reading, children in conservative Christian schools scored no
better than comparable children in public schools.
In eighth-grade math, children in Lutheran schools scored significantly better
than children in public schools, but those in conservative Christian schools
fared worse.
Joseph McTighe, executive director of the Council for American Private
Education, an umbrella organization that represents 80 percent of private
elementary and secondary schools, said the statistical analysis had little to do
with parents’ choices on educating their children.
"In the real world, private school kids outperform public school kids," Mr.
McTighe said. "That’s the real world, and the way things actually are."
Two weeks ago, the American Federation of Teachers, on its Web log, predicted
that the report would be released on a Friday, suggesting that the Bush
administration saw it as "bad news to be buried at the bottom of the news
cycle."
The deputy director for administration and policy at the Institute of Education
Sciences, Sue Betka, said the report was not released so it would go unnoticed.
Ms. Betka said her office typically gave senior officials two weeks’ notice
before releasing reports. "The report was ready two weeks ago Friday,’’ she
said, “and so today was the first day, according to longstanding practice, that
it could come out."
Public Schools
Perform Near Private Ones in Study, NYT, 15.7.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/15/education/15report.html?ex=1153368000&en=e8914c56557ff0e6&ei=5087%0A
The New Gender Divide
At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust
July 9, 2006
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN
Nearing graduation, Rick Kohn is not putting much energy
into his final courses.
"I take the path of least resistance," said Mr. Kohn, who works 25 hours a week
to put himself through the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "This
summer, I looked for the four easiest courses I could take that would let me
graduate in August."
It is not that Mr. Kohn, 24, is indifferent to education. He is excited about
economics and hopes to get his master's in the field. But the other classes, he
said, just do not seem worth the effort.
"What's the difference between an A and a B?" he asks. "Either way, you go on to
the next class."
He does not see his female classmates sharing that attitude. Women work harder
in school, Mr. Kohn believes. "The girls care more about their G.P.A. and the
way they look on paper," he said.
A quarter-century after women became the majority on college campuses, men are
trailing them in more than just enrollment.
Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or
socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees — and
among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also
get worse grades than women.
And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and
socialized more than their female classmates.
Small wonder, then, that at elite institutions like Harvard, small liberal arts
colleges like Dickinson, huge public universities like the University of
Wisconsin and U.C.L.A. and smaller ones like Florida Atlantic University, women
are walking off with a disproportionate share of the honors degrees.
It is not that men are in a downward spiral: they are going to college in
greater numbers and are more likely to graduate than two decades ago.
Still, men now make up only 42 percent of the nation's college students. And
with sex discrimination fading and their job opportunities widening, women are
coming on much stronger, often leapfrogging the men to the academic finish.
"The boys are about where they were 30 years ago, but the girls are just on a
tear, doing much, much better," said Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell
Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington.
Take Jen Smyers, who has been a powerhouse in her three years at American
University in Washington.
She has a dean's scholarship, has held four internships and three jobs in her
time at American, made the dean's list almost every term and also led the campus
women's initiative. And when the rest of her class graduates with bachelor's
degrees next year, Ms. Smyers will be finishing her master's.
She says her intense motivation is not so unusual. "The women here are on fire,"
she said.
The gender differences are not uniform. In the highest-income families, men 24
and under attend college as much as, or slightly more than, their sisters,
according to the American Council on Education, whose report on these issues is
scheduled for release this week.
Young men from low-income families, which are disproportionately black and
Hispanic, are the most underrepresented on campus, though in middle-income
families too, more daughters than sons attend college. In recent years the
gender gap has been widening, especially among low-income whites and Hispanics.
When it comes to earning bachelor's degrees, the gender gap is smaller than the
gap between whites and blacks or Hispanics, federal data shows.
All of this has helped set off intense debate over whether these trends show a
worrisome achievement gap between men and women or whether the concern should
instead be directed toward the educational difficulties of poor boys, black,
white or Hispanic.
"Over all, the differences between blacks and whites, rich and poor, dwarf the
differences between men and women within any particular group," says Jacqueline
King, a researcher for the American Council on Education's Center for Policy
Analysis and the author of the forthcoming report.
Differences Seen Early
Still, across all race and class lines, there are significant performance
differences between young men and women that start before college.
High school boys score higher than girls on the SAT, particularly on the math
section. Experts say that is both because the timed multiple-choice questions
play to boys' strengths and because more middling female students take the test.
Boys also score slightly better on the math and science sections of national
assessment tests. On the same assessments, 12th-grade boys, even those with
college-educated parents, do far worse than girls on reading and writing.
Faced with applications and enrollment numbers that tilt toward women, some
selective private colleges are giving men a slight boost in admissions. On other
campuses the female predominance is becoming noticeable in the female authors
added to the reading lists and the diminished dating scene.
And when it gets to graduation, differences are evident too.
At Harvard, 55 percent of the women graduated with honors this spring, compared
with barely half the men. And at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, a
public university, women made up 64 percent of this year's graduates, and they
got 75 percent of the honors degrees and 79 percent of the highest honors, summa
cum laude.
Of course, nationwide, there are young men at the top of the class and fields
like computer science, engineering and physics that are male dominated.
Professors interviewed on several campuses say that in their experience men seem
to cluster in a disproportionate share at both ends of the spectrum — students
who are the most brilliantly creative, and students who cannot keep up.
"My best male students are every bit as good as my best female students," said
Wendy Moffat, a longtime English professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.
"But the range among the guys is wider."
From the time they are young, boys are far more likely than girls to be
suspended or expelled, or have a learning disability or emotional problem
diagnosed. As teenagers, they are more likely to drop out of high school, commit
suicide or be incarcerated. Such difficulties can have echoes even in college
men.
"They have a sense of lassitude, a lack of focus," said William Pollack,
director of the Centers for Men and Young Men at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical
School.
At a time when jobs that require little education are disappearing, Mr.
Mortenson predicts trouble for boys whose "educational attainment is not keeping
up with the demands of the economy."
In the 1990's, even as women poured into college at a higher rate than men,
attention focused largely on their troubles, especially after the 1992 report
"How Schools Shortchange Girls" from the American Association of University
Women.
But some scholars say the new emphasis on young men's problems — recent magazine
covers and talk shows describing a "boy crisis" — is misguided in a world where
men still dominate the math-science axis, earn more money and wield more power
than women.
"People keep asking me why this is such a hot topic, and I think it does go back
to the ideas people carry in their heads," said Sara Mead, the author of a
report for Education Sector, a Washington policy center, that concluded that
boys, especially young ones, were making progress on many measures. It suggested
that the heightened concern might in part reflect some people's nervousness
about women's achievement.
"The idea that girls could be ahead is so shocking that they think it must be a
crisis for boys," Ms. Mead said. "I'm troubled by this tone of crisis. Even if
you control for the field they're in, boys right out of college make more money
than girls, so at the end of the day, is it grades and honors that matter, or
something else the boys may be doing?"
Women in the Majority
What is beyond dispute is that the college landscape is changing. Women now make
up 58 percent of those enrolled in two- and four-year colleges and are, over
all, the majority in graduate schools and professional schools too.
Most institutions of higher learning, except engineering schools, now have a
female edge, with many small liberal arts colleges and huge public universities
alike hovering near the 60-40 ratio. Even Harvard, long a male bastion, has
begun to tilt toward women.
"The class we just admitted will be 52 percent female," said William
Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions.
While Harvard accepts men and women in proportions roughly equal to their
presence in the applicant pool, other elite universities do not. At Brown
University, men made up not quite 40 percent of this year's applicants, but 47
percent of those admitted.
Women now outnumber men two to one at places like the State University of New
York at New Paltz, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Baltimore
City Community College. And they make up particularly large majorities among
older students.
The lower the family income, the greater the disparity between men and women
attending college, said Ms. King of the American Council on Education's Center
for Policy Analysis.
Thomas diPrete, a Columbia University sociology professor, has found that while
boys whose parents had only a high school education used to be more likely to
get a college education than their sisters, that has flipped.
Still, the gender gap has moved to the front burner in part because of interest
from educated mothers worrying that their sons are adrift or disturbed that
their girls are being passed over by admissions officers eager for boys, said
Judith Kleinfeld, a University of Alaska professor who has created the Boys
Project (boysproject.net), a coalition of researchers, educators and parents to
address boys' troubles.
"I hate to be cynical, but when it was a problem of black or poor kids, nobody
cared, but now that it's a problem of white sons of college-educated parents,
it's moving very rapidly to the forefront," Dr. Kleinfeld said. "At most
colleges, there is a sense that a lot of boys are missing in action."
Beyond the data points — graduation rates, enrollment rates, grades — there are
subtle differences in the nature of men's and women's college experiences.
In dozens of interviews on three campuses — Dickinson College; American
University; and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro — male and female
students alike agreed that the slackers in their midst were mostly male, and
that the fireballs were mostly female.
Almost all speculated that it had something to do with the women's movement.
"The roles have changed a lot," said Travis Rothway, a 23-year-old junior at
American University, a private school where only 36 percent of last year's
freshmen were male. "Men have always been the dominant figure, providing for the
household, but now women have broken out of their domestic roles in society. I
don't think guys' willingness to work and succeed has changed, it's more that
the women have stepped up."
Ben Turner, who graduated from American this spring, said he did not believe
that work habits were determined by gender — but acknowledged that he and his
girlfriend fit the stereotypes.
"She does all her readings for classes, and I don't always," Mr. Turner said.
"She's more organized than me, so if there's a paper due a week from Monday,
she's already started, and I know I'll be doing it the weekend before. She
studies more than I do because she doesn't like cramming and being stressed. She
just has a better work ethic than I do."
Ms. Smyers, also at American, said she recently ended a relationship with
another student, in part out of frustration over his playing video games four
hours a day.
"He said he was thinking of trying to cut back to 15 hours a week," she said. "I
said, 'Fifteen hours is what I spend on my internship, and I get paid $1,300 a
month.' That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who plays video games. It
means they're choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life
out of them."
Many male students say with something resembling pride that they get by without
much studying.
"If I take a class and never study, I can still get a B," said Scott Daniels, a
22-year-old at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "I know that if I'd
applied myself more, I would have had better grades."
On each campus, many young men concluded that the easy B was good enough. But on
each campus, some had seen that attitude backfire.
Michael Comes arrived at Dickinson two years ago from a private school in New
Jersey where he had done well, but floundered his freshman year.
"I came here with the attitudes I'd had in high school, that the big thing, for
guys, is to give the appearance of not doing much work, trying to excel at
sports and shine socially," Mr. Comes said. "It's like some cultural A.D.D. for
boys, I think — like Bart Simpson. For men, it's just not cool to study."
So when he no longer had parents and teachers keeping after him, or a 10:30 p.m.
lights-out rule, he did not do much work.
"I stayed in my room a lot, I slept a lot, and I messed up so much that I had to
go to summer school," Mr. Comes said. "But I'm back on track now."
'A Male Entitlement Thing'
On each campus, the young women interviewed talked mostly about their drive to
do well.
"Most college women want a high-powered career that they are passionate about,"
Ms. Smyers said. "But they also want a family, and that probably means taking
time off, and making dinner. I'm rushing through here, taking the most credits
you can take without paying extra, because I want to do some amazing things, and
establish myself as a career woman, before I settle down."
Her male classmates, she said, feel less pressure.
"The men don't seem to hustle as much," Ms. Smyers said. "I think it's a male
entitlement thing. They think they can sit back and relax and when they
graduate, they'll still get a good job. They seem to think that if they have a
firm handshake and speak properly, they'll be fine."
Such differences were apparent in the 2005 National Survey of Student
Engagement. While the survey of 90,000 students at 530 institutions relies on
self-reporting, it is used by many colleges to measure themselves against other
institutions.
Men were significantly more likely than women to say they spent at least 11
hours a week relaxing or socializing, while women were more likely to say they
spent at least that much time preparing for class. More men also said they
frequently came to class unprepared.
Linda Sax, an associate professor of education at the University of California,
Los Angeles, has found similar gender differences in her study of 17,000 men and
women at 204 co-ed colleges and universities.
Using data from U.C.L.A.'s Higher Education Research Institute annual studies,
she found that men were more likely than women to skip classes, not complete
their homework and not turn it in on time.
"Women do spend more time studying and their grades are better," Professor Sax
said, "but their grades are better even more than the extra studying time would
account for."
Researchers say such differences make sense, given boys' experience in their
earlier school years. And some experts argue that what is being seen as a boy
problem is actually maleness itself, with the noisy, energetic antsiness and
high jinks of young boys now redefined as a behavior problem by teachers who do
not know how to handle them.
There is also an economic rationale for men to take education less seriously. In
the early years of a career, Laura Perna of the University of Pennsylvania has
found, college increases women's earnings far more than men's.
"That's the trap," Dr. Kleinfeld said. "In the early years, young men don't see
the wage benefit. They can sell their strength and make money."
Lingering Money Worries
At Greensboro, where more than two-thirds of the students are female, and about
one in five is black, many young men say they are torn between wanting quick
money and seeking the long-term rewards of education.
"A lot of my friends made good money working in high school, in construction or
as electricians, and they didn't go to college, but they're doing very well
now," said Mr. Daniels, the Greensboro student, who works 25 to 30 hours a week.
"One of my best friends, he's making $70,000, he's got his own truck and health
benefits. The honest truth is, I feel weird being a college student and having
no money."
Mr. Kohn said it was, literally, an accident that he landed at Greensboro.
"In high school, I had a G.P.A. of 1.9 and I never took the SAT's because I knew
I wasn't going to college," he said. "If you don't have goals, you don't set
yourself up to be disappointed."
But soon after high school, Mr. Kohn was in a serious car crash, and discovered
in rehabilitation that the state would pay for community college. To his
surprise he did well enough to transfer to Greensboro, where he now plans to
pursue a master's degree. But when Mr. Kohn overheard a freshman woman
describing her plans, including four summer school courses to help her get a
master's in education a bit earlier, he was bemused.
"For a freshman to be in such a hurry, it seems a little obsessive," he said.
Many of the young women studying at Greensboro have older brothers without
college degrees, or younger brothers with little interest in college.
The seven children of the Thompson family of Oxford, N.C., embody the gender
differences regarding education.
There are three men and four women in the family, ranging in age from 36 to 23.
Christina and Lynette, the two youngest, are both at Greensboro. The two oldest
daughters went to college, too. But none of the sons got college degrees: one is
a truck driver, one is autistic and living at home and one is a floor manager at
a Research Triangle company.
"I think women feel more pressure to achieve," said Christina Thompson, a
political science major who plans to go to law school.
Right, said her youngest sister.
"In the past, black women in the South couldn't do much except clean, pick
cotton or take care of someone's children," Lynette Thompson said. "I think from
our mother we got the feeling we should try to use the opportunities that are
available to us now."
They and many other women at Greensboro say it is not bad to be on a campus with
twice as many women as men because it encourages them to stick to their studies
without the distraction of dating.
Maybe, said Ashleigh Pelick, a freshman who is dating a marine she met before
college — but she teased a friend, Madison Barringer: "You know you'll go crazy
if you never have another boyfriend before you graduate."
Ms. Barringer, a 19-year-old whose parents did not go to college, laughed. But
she did acknowledge the gender imbalance as a possible problem.
"I know it sounds picky, but I don't think I'd marry someone without a college
degree," she said. "I want to be able to have that intellectual conversation."
Creating a balance of men and women is now an issue for all but the most elite
colleges, whose huge applicant pools let them fill their classes with any
desired mix of highly-qualified men and women But for others, it is a delicate
issue. Colleges want balance, both for social reasons and to ensure that they
can attract a broad mix of applicants. But they do not want an atmosphere in
which talented, hard-working women share classes with less qualified, less
engaged men.
The calculus is different at different institutions. By administrators'
accounts, American University has been relatively unconcerned to see its student
body tipping female, faster than most others.
The admissions office said that its decisions were gender blind, and that it
accepted a larger share of female applicants. In an interview, Ivy Broder, the
interim provost, seemed surprised, but not bothered, that American had a higher
proportion of women than Vassar College, which formerly admitted only women.
American has no engineering school and no football team; it is a campus where
the Democrats' organization is Democratic Women and Friends; "The Vagina
Monologues" sells out at annual performances; and almost 1,000 people turned out
for the Breastival, a women's health fair.
The faculty is attracting more and more women: a majority of the professors now
on the tenure track are female.
Women on campus say there is great female solidarity. What there is not much of,
said Gail Short Hanson, the director of campus life, is a dating scene.
Said Ms. Hanson: "If there's a dance, like the Founder's Day dance in February,
do the women get their hair done? Yes. Do they get their nails done? Yes. But do
they have a date? Probably not. So who do they dance with? Whoever wants to
dance."
If American University is comfortable being largely female, that is not the case
on Dickinson College's charming but isolated campus in central Pennsylvania. At
a time when most colleges are becoming increasingly female, Dickinson has raised
its proportion of men. Even rarer is that Dickinson has publicly discussed its
quest for gender balance.
The Goal: More Male Students
Robert Massa, vice president for enrollment, began campaigning for more male
students shortly after he arrived at Dickinson in 1999 and discovered that only
36 percent of the incoming freshmen were male and that the college had accepted
73 percent of the women who applied, but only 53 percent of the men.
Dickinson adapted to the growing female majority by starting a women's center,
adding a women's studies major and offering courses on Jane Austen and Virginia
Woolf.
In his effort to attract men, Mr. Massa made sure that the admissions materials
included plenty of pictures of young men and athletics. Dickinson began
highlighting its new physics, computer science and math building, and started a
program in international business. Most fundamental, Dickinson began accepting a
larger proportion of its male applicants.
"The secret of getting some gender balance is that once men apply, you've got to
admit them," Mr. Massa said. "So did we bend a little bit? Yeah, at the margin,
we did, but not to the point that we would admit guys who couldn't do the work."
Longtime Dickinson administrators say that at isolated campuses with their own
social worlds, gender balance is especially important.
"When there were fewer men, the environment was not as safe for women," said
Joyce Bylander, associate provost. "When men were so highly prized that they
could get away with things, some of them become sexual predators. It was an
unhealthy atmosphere for women."
In education circles, Mr. Massa is sometimes accused of practicing unfair
affirmative action for boys. He has a presentation called "What's Wrong With You
Guys?" in which he says that Dickinson does not accept a greater proportion of
male than female applicants, and that women still get more financial aid.
"Is this affirmative action?" Mr. Massa said. "Not in the legal sense." He says
that admissions to a liberal arts college is more art than science, a matter of
crafting a class with diverse strengths.
Mr. Massa reshaped Dickinson in one year. Of the freshmen admitted in 2000, 43
percent were male, and in recent years Dickinson's student body has been about
44 percent male. This year, Dickinson admitted an equal share of the male and
the female applicants.
In the Dickinson cafeteria on a spring afternoon, the byplay between two men and
two women could provide a text on gender differences. The men, Dennis Nelson and
Victor Johnson, African-American football players nearing the end of their
junior year, teased each other about never wanting to be seen in the library.
They talked about playing "Madden," a football video game, six hours a day,
about how they did not spend much time on homework.
"A lot of women want a 4.0 average, and they'll work for it," Mr. Nelson said.
"I never wanted it because it's too much work to be worth it. And a lot of
women, they have everything planned out for the next three years."
Mr. Johnson jumped in: "Yeah, and it boggles my mind because I don't have my
life planned for the next 10 minutes. Women see the long-term benefits, they
take their classes seriously, and they're actively learning. We learn for tests.
With us, if someone calls the night before and says there's going to be a test,
we study enough for a C."
His female friends offered their assessment. "They're really, really smart, and
they think they don't have to work," Glenda Cabral said.
But they do. After two years of good grades, Mr. Johnson this year failed
Spanish and Arab-Israeli relations.
"He called me the night before the test and asked who Nasser was," Julie Younes
said, rolling her eyes.
At Dickinson, as elsewhere, men are overrepresented among the problem students.
Of 33 students on probation this year, all but six were male. They account for
most disciplinary actions, too.
"If it's outside-the-line behavior, boys are pretty much the ones doing it," Ms.
Bylander said. "This generation, and especially the boys, is technology-savvy
but interpersonally challenged. They've been highly structured, highly
programmed, with organized play groups and organized sports, and they don't know
much about how to run their own lives."
Disengagement Is Noticed
Men are underrepresented when it comes to graduation and honors. Eighty-three
percent of women who were Dickinson freshmen in 2001 graduated four years later,
compared with 75 percent of the men. Dickinson women, who made up just over half
of last year's graduates, got slightly more than two-thirds of the cum laude,
magna and summa degrees.
Since the process of human development crosses all borders, it makes sense that
Europe, too, now has more women than men heading to college. The disengagement
of young men, though, takes different forms in different cultures. Japan, over
the last decade, has seen the emergence of "hikikomori" — young men withdrawing
to their rooms, eschewing social life for months or years on end.
At Dickinson, some professors and administrators have begun to notice a similar
withdrawal among men who arrive on campus with deficient social skills. Each
year, there are several who mostly stay in their rooms, talk to no one, play
video games into the wee hours and miss classes until they withdraw or flunk
out.
This spring, Rebecca Hammell, dean of freshman and sophomores, counseled one
such young man to withdraw.
"He was in academic trouble from the start," Ms. Hammell said. "He was playing
games till 3, 4, 5 in the morning, in an almost compulsive way. From early in
the year, his teachers reported that he was either not coming to class or
falling asleep once he was there. I checked with the Residential Life office,
and they said he was in his room all the time."
Of course, female behavior has its own extremes. In freshman women, educators
worry about eating disorders and perfectionism.
But among the freshman men, the problems stem mostly from immaturity.
"There was so much freedom when I got here, compared to my very structured high
school life, that I kept putting things off," said Greg Williams, who just
finished his freshman year. "I wouldn't do much work and I played a lot of Halo.
I didn't know how to wake up on time without a mom. I had laundry problems. I
shrank all my clothes and had to buy new ones."
Still, men in the work force have always done better in pay and promotions, in
part because they tend to work longer hours, and have fewer career interruptions
than women, who bear the children and most of the responsibility for raising
them.
Whether the male advantage will persist even as women's academic achievement
soars is an open question. But many young men believe that, once in the work
world, they will prevail.
"I think men do better out in the world because they care more about the power,
the status, the C.E.O. job," Mr. Kohn said. "And maybe society holds men a
little higher."
At Colleges, Women
Are Leaving Men in the Dust, NYT, 9.7.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html?hp&ex=1152417600&en=9e7c68c097d2ec04&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Schools' Efforts on Race Await Justices' Ruling
June 24, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — School officials in Berkeley, Calif.,
take race as well as parent income into account as they assign students to
public schools, with a result that many black children who live downtown are
bused to classes in the mostly white neighborhoods on the hills that overlook
San Francisco Bay.
In Lynn, Mass., the authorities guarantee that children can attend their
neighborhood school, but consider race in weighing students' transfer requests,
sometimes blocking those that would increase racial imbalance.
And here in Louisville, the school board uses race as a factor in a student
assignment plan to keep enrollments at most schools roughly in line with the
district's overall racial composition, making this one of the most thoroughly
integrated urban school systems in the nation.
As different as they are, all these approaches and many more like them could now
be in jeopardy, lawyers say, because of the Supreme Court's decision this month
to review cases involving race and school assignment programs here and in
Seattle.
"We'll be watching this very closely, because whichever way the Supreme Court
rules, it will certainly have an impact on our district," said Arthur R. Culver,
superintendent of schools in Champaign, Ill., where African-American students
make up 36 percent of students. Under a court-supervised plan, the district
keeps the proportion of black students in all schools within 15 percentage
points of that average by controlling school assignments.
Over the past 15 years, courts have ended desegregation orders in scores of
school districts. But many districts around the country seek to maintain
diversity with voluntary programs like magnet schools and magnet programs,
clustering plans that group schools in black neighborhoods with those in white,
and weighted admissions lotteries that assign classroom seats by race.
All of this is now a gray area of the law until there is guidance from the
Supreme Court on how far school systems may go in the quest for racial
diversity.
Courts in the 1990's mostly struck down the use of race in assignment decisions,
but three federal rulings since 2003 have permitted its use. As the legal
ambiguity has grown, hundreds of districts have dropped voluntary efforts to
maintain racial balance. Others have vigorously pursued them, even as a debate
has emerged over whether racially mixed schools provide the nation with
important educational benefits.
"Most school districts believe that there are educational benefits in having
students attend school with other students of different backgrounds," said Maree
Sneed, a lawyer who filed a brief in the Louisville case on behalf of the
Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of the nation's largest urban
districts. "It prepares them to be better citizens."
But Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Washington
group critical of affirmative action, said such assertions were based on
"touchy-feely social science."
"It'd be dangerous for the court to allow discrimination whenever a school board
produces some social scientist who claims that racially balancing schools to the
nth degree is essential for teaching students to be good citizens," Mr. Clegg
said.
The debate comes as immigration, housing patterns and ethnic change have made
achieving racial balance in the schools an increasing challenge.
A study published this year by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University
reported that partly because of the rapid growth of Latino and Asian
populations, the traditional black-white model of American race relations was
breaking down. Yet white students remained the most racially isolated group,
even though they were attending schools with more minority students than ever
before, the report said.
Although whites in 2003-04 made up 58 percent of the nation's public school
population, the average white student attended a school where 78 percent of
pupils were also white, the study said.
The proportion of black students attending schools where 10 percent of students
or fewer were white increased to 38 percent in 2003-04 from 34 percent in
1991-92.
Gary Orfield, the project's director, said a decision barring the use of race in
student assignments would most likely intensify those trends.
"School boards would be captives to the racial segregation that occurs in
housing markets," Mr. Orfield said. "Boards would be forbidden to do what courts
once ordered them to do, and what they now want to do voluntarily."
How many of the nation's 15,000 districts currently consider race in assigning
students to schools is unclear because no one keeps track, experts said. A brief
filed in the Louisville case by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative
public-interest law firm, asserts that "nearly 1,000 districts" have some type
of race-based assignment plan.
But that figure traces from a 1990 Department of Education survey of schools,
and David J. Armor, a George Mason University professor who participated in that
survey, said that in the 1990's, many districts abandoned race-based plans.
Still, he estimated that "many hundreds of school districts" continued to use
race in assigning students to schools.
Many of the nation's largest urban districts have so few white students that
large-scale plans to seek racial balance are hardly feasible. New York, where 14
percent of students are white, does not consider race in school assignments,
said Michael Best, the Department of Education's general counsel. The only
exception is Mark Twain Intermediate School in Brooklyn, where a 1974 federal
court order requires that the school's racial demographics be kept in line with
surrounding middle schools.
At least a half-dozen cities have developed voluntary student transfer programs
that involve enrolling minority students from an urban district in a suburban
district.
The Jefferson County district in Louisville is one of the most thoroughly
integrated urban school systems in the nation. That is partly because its
boundaries include suburbs as well as Louisville's urban core. Sixty percent of
students are white, and 35 percent are black.
Its student assignment plan, which evolved from a court-ordered desegregation
effort, keeps black enrollment in most schools in the range of 15 percent to 50
percent by encouraging, and in some cases obliging, white students to attend
schools in black neighborhoods, and vice versa.
Fran Ellers and her husband are writers who are white. They live in the
Highlands neighborhood east of downtown. But they enrolled their children, Jack
and Zoe, at Coleridge-Taylor Montessori Elementary in the largely black West
End.
"We wanted a diverse environment," Ms. Ellers said. "When I toured
Coleridge-Taylor, I was struck by the mix of black and white children, quietly
working together as equals in a classroom."
Nechelle D. Crawford, by contrast, who is African-American and lives in the West
End, said her sons Keion and Jeron could attend Coleridge-Taylor, but instead
she opted to send them to Wilder Elementary in a largely white suburb 25 minutes
away by bus. "The boys love Wilder," Mrs. Crawford said, adding that there are a
number of international students. "They have different opportunities, see
different faces."
In a survey carried out in 2000 by the University of Kentucky, 67 percent of
parents said they believed that a school's enrollment should reflect the overall
racial diversity of the school district.
A white lawyer, Teddy B. Gordon, ran for a seat on the Jefferson County School
Board in 2004, promising to work to end the district's desegregation plan. He
finished last, behind three other candidates.
Mr. Gordon represents the plaintiff in the Louisville case, Crystal D. Meredith,
who is white. She sued after the district denied her request to transfer her son
Joshua from Young Elementary, in the West End, to Bloom Elementary, nearer her
home. The district said the transfer would disrupt Young's racial balance.
Judge John G. Heyburn II of Federal District Court ruled against Ms. Meredith in
2004, saying that the district had shown a "compelling interest" in maintaining
integrated schools. A federal appeals court upheld that ruling, but the Supreme
Court has now agreed to review the case.
In an interview, Mr. Gordon predicted that if Louisville's student assignment
plan was overturned, the schools would rapidly resegregate. But that should be
of no concern, he said.
"We're a diverse society, a multiethnic society, a colorblind society," he said.
"Race is history."
Chester Darling, the lawyer who represented parents in a 1999 suit challenging a
school assignment plan in Lynn, Mass., holds similar views. "If children are in
segregated schools, de facto or not, as long as they are getting the education
they need that's fine," he said.
Lynn, nine miles north of Boston, is one of 20 Massachusetts school districts
that receives financial incentives for promoting racial balance under state law.
Lynn's plan seeks to keep the proportion of nonwhite students in elementary
schools within 15 percent of the overall proportion of minorities in the
district's student population. Last year, 32 percent of students were white, and
68 percent were nonwhite.
Under the Berkeley plan, parents choose three schools, and the district weighs
classroom space and parents' education and income, as well as race in assigning
the child.
"New parents would prefer to have their kids in a neighborhood school, that's
pretty overwhelming," said Michele Lawrence, Berkeley's superintendent. "But if
I surveyed parents who have gone through the process and met teachers, they
would have a high percentage of satisfaction."
David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting from New York for this article.
Schools' Efforts
on Race Await Justices' Ruling, NYT, 24.6.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/24/us/24race.html?hp&ex=1151208000&en=125474bfd9ac18c5&ei=5094&partner=homepage
In Gilded Age of Home Schooling, Students Have Private
Teachers
June 5, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY
In what is an elite tweak on home schooling — and a
throwback to the gilded days of education by governess or tutor — growing
numbers of families are choosing the ultimate in private school: hiring teachers
to educate their children in their own homes.
Unlike the more familiar home-schoolers of recent years, these families are not
trying to get more religion into their children's lives, or escape what some
consider the tyranny of the government's hand in schools. In fact, many say they
have no argument with ordinary education — it just does not fit their
lifestyles.
Lisa Mazzoni's family splits its time between Marina del Rey, Calif., and Delray
Beach, Fla. Lisa has her algebra and history lessons delivered poolside
sometimes or on her condominium's rooftop, where she and her teacher enjoy the
sun and have a view of the Pacific Ocean south of Santa Monica.
"For someone who travels a lot or has a parent who travels and wants to keep the
family together, it's an excellent choice," said Lisa's mother, Trish Mazzoni,
who with her husband owns a speedboat company.
The cost for such teachers generally runs $70 to $110 an hour. And depending on
how many hours a teacher works, and how many teachers are involved, the price
can equal or surpass tuition in the upper echelon of private schools in New York
City or Los Angeles, where $30,000 a year is not unheard of.
Other parents say the model works for children who are sick, for children who
are in show business or for those with learning disabilities.
"It's a hidden group of folks, but it's growing enormously," said Luis Huerta, a
professor of public policy and education at Teachers College of Columbia
University, whose national research includes a focus on home schooling.
The United States Department of Education last did a survey on home schooling in
2003. That survey did not ask about full-time in-home teachers. But it found
that from 1999 to 2003, the number of children who were educated at home had
soared, increasing by 29 percent, to 1.1 million students nationwide. It also
found that, of those, 21 percent used a tutor.
Home schooling is legal in every state, though some regulate it more than
others. Home-school teachers do not require certification, and the only common
requirement from state to state is that students meet compulsory-attendance
rules.
Scholars who study home-schooling trends, business owners who serve
home-schooling families and abundant anecdotal evidence also suggest that
private teaching arrangements are on the rise. Some families do it for short
stints, others for years at a time.
Bob Harraka, president of Professional Tutors of America, has about 6,000
teachers from 14 states on his payroll in Orange County, Calif., but cannot meet
a third of the requests for in-home education that come in, he said, because
they are so specialized or extravagant: a family wants a teacher to instruct in
the art of Frisbee throwing, button sewing or Latin grammar. A family wants a
teacher to accompany them for a yearlong voyage at sea.
"Sailing comes up at least once or twice a year," Mr. Harraka said.
Parents say in-home teaching arrangements offer unparalleled levels of academic
attention and flexibility in scheduling, in addition to a sense of family
cohesion and autonomy over what children learn. To them, these advantages make
up for the lack of a school social life, which they say can be replicated
through group lessons in, say, ballet or sculpture.
Jon D. Snyder, dean of the Bank Street College of Education in New York, said
his main concerns about this form of education were whether tutors and students
were a good fit, and whether students got enough social interaction.
"From a purely academic standpoint, it goes back to a much earlier era," Dr.
Snyder said. "The notion of individual tutorials is a time-honored tradition,
particularly among the elite."
Think Plato, John Stuart Mill and George Washington. Philosopher kings and
gentleman farmers. Because of the cost of in-home tutoring, the idea will
probably not spread like wildfire, and just as well, Dr. Snyder said.
"Public education has social goals; that's why we pay tax dollars for it," he
said. "When Socrates was tutoring Plato, he wasn't concerned about educating the
other people in Greece. They were just concerned about educating Plato."
On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Krystal and Tiffany Wheeler earn high
school credits in adjacent pastel bedrooms after breakfast. The teachers come to
them.
Their mother, Charlene Royce, said she wanted her girls to experience the
benefits of a personalized education but did not feel comfortable teaching
herself.
"I feel that education is better this way, one on one," said Ms. Royce, whose
expertise is in finding electronics companies in which to invest. "It was never
an option for me to do it — I wouldn't know how."
For help, she turned to a Manhattan business, On Location Education, which took
care of the logistics, providing her with curricula and teachers. Ms. Royce gets
weekly progress reports and a visit every couple of months from a woman she
calls "the mobile principal."
To meet their social needs — and for exercise — Tiffany and Krystal attend dance
and piano classes, among other things, and belong to a gym.
Lisa Mazzoni takes acting and dance classes in Hollywood. She is also enrolled
in a school for distance learning that provides a curriculum for her tutor, Rob
Cox, of Professional Tutors of America, to teach.
"I do love the fact that instead of waking up at 5:30 every morning I get to
wake up at 8:30," said Lisa, who is 17 and attended private school until this
year.
"It makes life so much easier," Lisa continued. "I don't have to worry about
missing tests and if I really wanted to, I could bring the work with me —
because it's all in the computer — if I'm in Florida visiting my dad or going to
a boat race."
When Nick Niell, an investment banker, and his wife, Sarah, moved to New York
from East Sussex, England, for about a year in 2003, four teachers would come on
weekdays to Mr. Niell's townhouse on 69th Street near Madison Avenue to teach
his three school-aged children. Mr. Niell said he could not find a British
school in the city and wanted his children to study the same things they would
have studied in England. A floor of the house was converted into classroom
space.
"It was quite good fun," said Mr. Niell, whose teachers came through Partners
with Parents, a Manhattan in-home tutoring service.
The families embracing the one-on-one home-school model are turning the original
concept on its head. Dr. Huerta said the popular notion is that home-schoolers
leave schools they see as troubled, certain they can do better as teachers
themselves. Hiring teachers for full-time instruction is not typical.
The new and more expansive definitions of home schooling irritate some
traditionalists who want to keep the model simpler. "People use the term home
schooling for all sorts of interesting things these days," said Celeste Land, a
member of the board at the Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers. "Obviously
it's not pure home schooling."
But the growing number of home-school support groups has made it easier for the
new model to develop. And tutoring is more in the public consciousness these
days in part because of the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind,
which includes a tutoring component, and the vast array of test prep tutoring
services being pitched to an increasingly tested national student body.
Companies that supply teachers and curricula are abundant, also making it easier
for families to step away from traditional schools, experts say. And though many
who follow the new model are wealthy, increasing numbers of middle class
families more sociologically and racially diverse have begun to school their
children at home, according to education officials and tutor-service companies.
Laurie Gerber, president of Partners with Parents, said she started to get
requests for in-home teachers about three or four years ago.
"Our tutoring business started to become a huge percentage of home-schooling
clients, as opposed to tutoring," Ms. Gerber said. "We started a whole
home-schooling wing."
The teachers who are hired to home school say the job is great.
"I love it; it's a dream come true," said Mr. Cox, who tutors Lisa Mazzoni. He
is a former television and radio news reporter as well as an actor and a
certified teacher.
"If you want to travel or have some other business to attend to, there isn't a
school system dependent on you being there," he said. "It's your own individual
school that operates according to your needs."
Tiffany Wheeler's tutor, Nancy Falong, retired a few years ago after 32 years as
a teacher in the New Jersey public schools. Now she works for On Location
Education. Sitting next to Tiffany last week, their two world history books
turned to the same page on the Marshall Plan, she expressed a sense of delight.
"This is pure teaching."
And Tiffany, looking relaxed with bare feet under her bedroom desk, said, "It's
fun."
In Gilded Age of
Home Schooling, Students Have Private Teachers, NYT, 5.6.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/education/05homeschool.html?hp&ex=1149566400&en=0b57e49f8304c2c9&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Harlem, a Test Lab, Splits Over Charter Schools
June 2, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY
The schools sit side by side in a handsome red brick
building in Harlem overlooking Morningside Park. But they could not be more
different.
The fifth and sixth graders at KIPP Star College Prep Charter School earned some
of the highest scores in central Harlem on last year's citywide reading exams.
At Public School 125, only 36 percent of the third- through sixth-grade students
met city and state reading standards last year.
The contrast in the building on West 123rd Street is emblematic of the
inequities, opportunity and experimentation that define education across Harlem
after decades of stagnation, and as gentrification is increasing pressures for
better schools.
By the end of next year, Harlem will be home to 17 charter schools, publicly
financed but privately run — more than in Staten Island, Queens and Lower
Manhattan combined. The Bronx has a high concentration, too, but only Brooklyn
is expected to have more charter schools by the end of next year.
Harlem also has dozens of struggling traditional schools and six of the
Bloomberg administration's new small themed schools.
The variety is prompting sharp debate. Some parents in Harlem are delighted with
the new choices and are showing up by the hundreds at lotteries for the limited
charter school seats. Others charge that the charter schools are unproven and
are milking the traditional public schools of the most promising students.
"The public system failed my first grandson," said Margarita Maya, a Harlem
resident, explaining that he did not earn a diploma.
Now, Ms. Maya said, her younger grandchildren attend the Harlem Village Academy
charter school. "I wanted something different for the rest," she said, "and I
found everything I could ever want in this new school."
But Carmen M. Colon, the president of an association of school district parent
councils, says the changes are contributing to resentments between those who are
able to grasp the limited new opportunities and those who are not among the
chosen.
"You see a lot of interesting and sometimes shocking things in Harlem, mainly
the disappearance of the middle ground in terms of schools," she said. "It's a
gap that many people think is growing."
Chancellor Joel I. Klein has encouraged the educational ferment. "We're moving
on all fronts," he said in an interview. "When I took over the job, what was the
lowest performing district? District 5, Harlem. What you do is try to create
opportunity."
Mr. Klein said: "I want parents to say, 'Look, we could lose people to charter
schools if our school doesn't improve. Competition in this thing works."
Eight percent of the 35,000 students in Harlem, which spans three school
districts across Upper Manhattan, attend charter schools. In contrast, only 1
percent of the 1.1 million students citywide attend charter schools.
City education officials do not track where the students in charter schools come
from, but say they most likely live in the schools' immediate area.
They also know that the population in Harlem's traditional schools has declined,
saying the numbers have dropped by about 1,500 in central Harlem and East Harlem
since 2002.
Parts of Harlem stretch into District 3 on the West Side and District 4 in East
Harlem. But the heart of the neighborhood is covered by District 5. The schools
there range the gamut.
There is Intermediate School 172, which earned a reputation for violence. There
are the KIPP schools, part of a growing national chain (it stands for Knowledge
Is Power Program). They enjoy Mr. Klein's blessing along with the Village
Academies, a local network of charter schools.
The sprawling social service center, the Harlem Children's Zone, is there, too.
Its chief executive is Geoffrey Canada, who has opened two charter schools since
last year.
Then there is I.S. 275, which is being closed next month because of persistent
poor performance, but also P.S. 154, which turned itself around and is in good
standing.
Dennis M. Walcott, the deputy mayor for education, said that Harlem would get a
new middle school in the fall and that the six new small schools serve almost
1,000 students.
To parents, who have seen the redevelopment of the past decade bring safer
streets, new stores and higher-income residents, the level of desire for the new
reflects the area's swelling ambition, the aspiration to move away from schools
that do not work even if it is into the unknown.
QuYahni Lewis said that she gave up on elementary schools in Harlem when her
9-year-old daughter came home with bite marks and a pencil stab wound. Next year
that daughter will be going to KIPP Star, and two of her other children will be
at Harlem Link Charter School, where she works as a secretary. "Thank God we
ended up getting that," she said of the charter schools.
Ms. Lewis added: "Every day there was another story about this bully or that
bully. I found that there were really no good options here outside of paying for
school. Where else are we going to go? What else are we going to do?"
Others are suspicious of the charter schools and ask whether they are drawing
the most promising students and only making the older, struggling schools worse
— not improving them through competition.
Cordell Cleare, an official of the community education council for District 3,
said of the new charter schools, "If they're so rich and golden, why aren't they
everywhere?"
Robert A. Reed, the president of a central Harlem council of parent
associations, said, "They've picked this population as a guinea pig district."
But he also acknowledged that he entered his young daughter in a charter school
lottery and she won a seat for next year that she may take.
When Mr. Klein became chancellor in 2002, schools in District 5 still lagged in
test scores, as they had for decades, and he said he made improving them a
priority. Now, scores there have begun to rise.
In Grades 3 through 8 in 1999, 19.3 percent of students in District 5 met city
and state reading standards. In 2005, 36 percent did. School safety and
leadership stability continue to be nettlesome issues, parents say.
"We're seeing progress after decades of nonperformance," Mr. Klein said. "We
have a lot of work to do, but the thing to do is to continue creating options
while we improve existing schools."
Options, however, remain limited, and the harsh feelings about the new schools
are particularly strong among longtime residents who see themselves as having
already been on the losing end of the recent real estate boom.
Race may also be a factor; some parents refer to charter school operators as
"outsiders" who do not understand the local culture. While the schools'
populations are mostly minority, a number of the operators are white.
Parents like Mr. Reed also complain that charter school quality varies too
wildly, or that their academic results are simply unknown. On many report cards
issued by the state, the space for test scores from some charter schools is
blank — either because results have yet to materialize, or the school did not
include fourth- and eighth-grade classes, which until this year were the only
grades subject to state testing.
"Any new school by definition is new," Mr. Klein said, speaking about the lack
of data. "When you see a thousand people on a waiting list, you see that, and
what does that mean? That's what parents want."
Not so, said former Councilman Bill Perkins, a longtime Harlem representative
now running for the State Senate. "They're not going toward charter because it's
proven as good, they're going away from what is proven as bad," he said. While
some parents said they had thought the gentrification of much of Harlem
throughout the 1990's would be accompanied by the improvement of the older
public schools, they did not see it happen. Instead the charters started
opening.
"Despite this infusion of economic development, the children were failing, and
that is exactly the answer to why, in 2001, when we set out to create a model
public school, we picked Harlem," said Deborah Kenny, the founder and chief
officer of Village Academies, a network of charter schools based in Harlem. "The
children were really, really deeply in need."
For her new school, Harlem Success Academy, former City Councilwoman Eva S.
Moskowitz chose Harlem, too. "District 5 in central Harlem has had a very long
history of significant underperformance," she said. "Something has to break the
lock of whatever's going on, and I'm certainly hoping it's charter schools."
Ms. Moskowitz ran head-on into the neighborhood skepticism of new charter
schools, when parents and the teachers' union successfully fought her plan to
put Harlem Success into P.S. 154. Parents complained that Harlem Success would
put a strain on space and resources and the city found her a space in a
different school, P.S. 162, where she is also encountering opposition.
"The chancellor comes in and says they're doing us a service with charter
schools," said Dawn DeCosta, the teachers' union chapter leader at P.S. 154.
"But if your service is crushing somebody else's program, that's not a service."
Parents like Heriberto Ramos, the parent-teacher association president at P.S.
129, remain suspicious that the improvements are not for them, but for the new
class of residents whose middle-class backgrounds give their children a head
start.
"Schools are a service for the public," he said. "And I feel all this is not for
all of us."
On 123rd Street, at least, there is a spirit of cooperation between P.S. 125 and
KIPP Star. Sometimes they share a gym or the pool. Often, they share advice.
"Their teachers have asked us for help and I have asked their principal for
help," said Maggie Runyan-Shefa, the principal at KIPP Star. "We have stuff to
learn from each other."
Harlem, a Test
Lab, Splits Over Charter Schools, NYT, 2.6.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/nyregion/02harlem.html?hp&ex=1149307200&en=99bc8846669fc34c&ei=5094&partner=homepage
|