History > 2006 > USA > Education (III)

NYT        September 29, 2006

In Many Public Schools, the Paddle Is No Relic        NYT

30.9.2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/education/30punish.html

In Many Public Schools,

the Paddle Is No Relic

September 30, 2006
The New York Times
By RICK LYMAN

EVERMAN, Tex. — Anthony Price does not mince words when talking about corporal punishment — which he refers to as taking pops — a practice he recently reinstated at the suburban Fort Worth middle school where he is principal.

“I’m a big fan,” Mr. Price said. “I know it can be abused. But if used properly, along with other punishments, a few pops can help turn a school around. It’s had a huge effect here.”

Tina Morgan, who works on a highway crew in rural North Carolina, gave permission for her son to be paddled in his North Carolina middle school. But she said she was unprepared for Travis, now 12, to come home with a backside that was a florid kaleidoscope of plums and lemons and blood oranges.

“This boy might need a blistering now and then, with his knucklehead,” Ms. Morgan said, swatting at him playfully, but she added that she never wanted him to be beaten like that. “I’ve decided, we’ve got to get corporal punishment out of the schools.”

Over most of the country and in all but a few major metropolitan areas, corporal punishment has been on a gradual but steady decline since the 1970’s, and 28 states have banned it. But the practice remains alive, particularly in rural parts of the South and the lower Midwest, where it is not only legal, but also widely practiced.

In a handful of districts, like the one here in Everman, there have been recent moves to reinstate it, some successful, more not. In Delaware, a bill to rescind that state’s ban on paddling never got through the legislature. But in Pike County, Ohio, corporal punishment was reinstated last year. And in southeast Mississippi, the Laurel school board voted in August to reinstate a corporal punishment policy, passing one that bars men from paddling women, but does not require parental consent, as many other policies do.

The most recent federal statistics show that during the 2002-3 school year, more than 300,000 American schoolchildren were disciplined with corporal punishment, usually one or more blows with a thick wooden paddle. Sometimes holes were cut in the paddle to make the beating more painful. Of those students, 70 percent were in five Southern states: Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas.

Often the battle over corporal punishment is being fought on the edges of Southern cities, where suburban growth pushes newcomers from across the country into rural and religiously conservative communities. In these areas, educators say, corporal punishment is far more accepted, resulting in clashing attitudes about child-rearing and using the rod.

“I couldn’t believe it when I learned about it,” said Peggy Dean, a mother of three students in Union County, N.C., a rapidly growing suburb south of Charlotte. “If I’d known, I’d never have moved into this school district.”

As views of child-rearing have changed, groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Association of School Psychologists and the American Medical and Bar Associations have come out against corporal punishment.

“I believe we have reached the point in our social evolution where this is no longer acceptable, just as we reached a point in the last half of the 19th century where husbands using corporal punishment on their wives was no longer acceptable,” said Murray Straus, a director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire.

Among adherents of the practice is James C. Dobson, the child psychologist who founded Focus on the Family and is widely regarded as one of the nation’s most influential evangelical leaders.

DuBose Ravenel, a North Carolina pediatrician who is the in-house expert on the subject for Mr. Dobson’s group, said, “I believe the whole country would be better off if corporal punishment was allowed in schools by parents who wish it.”

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed around the country, including as recently as August in a case involving a student and a baseball coach in Cameron County, Okla., but thus far, courts have tended to side with school districts in cases where a corporal punishment policy is on the books, said Nadine Block, the director of the Center for Effective Discipline, a group opposed to the practice.

In North Carolina, paddling is banned in the largest cities, like Charlotte. It remains legal in 70 percent of the state’s districts, although since they tend to be small and rural, fewer than half of the state’s students are covered.

Union County is one of the nation’s fastest-growing, with dozens of new suburban developments, often populated with transplants from the Northeast and elsewhere.

Ms. Dean, one of those transplants, came across the corporal punishment provisions while reading through her new district’s school policies and, shocked, decided to mount a campaign to have it outlawed that has made her the bane of local officials.

“They don’t like outsiders coming in and telling them how to run their schools,” Ms. Dean said.

She rallied others to the cause, finally forcing a vote on the issue last year.

School board members voted 5 to 3 to ban the practice, but under the district’s rules, a supermajority of six votes was needed, so the policy remains on the books.

“Some of our school board members felt that, if it were used correctly, as it would be, corporal punishment would be yet another deterrent to keep students from misbehaving,” said Luan Ingram, the chief communications officer for the district.

Still, Ms. Ingram said, “none of our 41 principals have chosen to use it, and none of them plan to use it.”

One of those who joined Ms. Dean’s crusade was John Erker, who retired from the New York City Police Department and relocated his family to North Carolina.

“We thought it would be a lifestyle for the whole family down here, a little more laid-back, a little more country,” Mr. Erker said. “But we’re in the middle of the Bible Belt, and a lot of these old-school people really believe that this is the right thing to do with children.”

In more rural Robeson County, Ms. Morgan said her son, Travis, was punished last year for taking part in a punching game called flinching. She complained that it was too severe, but district officials ruled that the paddling had been justified.

Al Kahn, a spokesman for the district, said he understood that corporal punishment was not embraced everywhere. “I guess every part of the country has a different way of looking at things,” Mr. Kahn said, “and down here we’re pretty unique.”

Mr. Price, the middle school principal, also said corporal punishment worked. He arrived at the school two years ago, hired, he said, to turn around an institution that was rife with fights, students cursing teachers and gang activity.

Not until months after he arrived, Mr. Price said, did a parent tell him that corporal punishment was used at the high school. He got permission to reinstate it in the middle school, too, and began with the 2005-6 school year, during which 150 of the school’s 685 students were paddled.

The Everman district is not unique in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in allowing corporal punishment. A study by The Dallas Morning News in August placed it fifth among area districts in instances of corporal punishment, far behind schools in Prosper, north of Dallas, for instance, where nearly 15 percent of the students were paddled in the 2005-6 school year.

But, in two of Dallas’s largest suburban districts, Plano and Frisco, paddling was banned this year, as it was in Memphis last year.

Mr. Price said he initially encountered resistance. “I was cursed out so much, I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “And I’m talking about the parents.”

But gradually, the tenor of the school turned around, he said, for the better. He designed what he called the school’s “discipline ladder,” beginning with a warning for a first offense and escalating through push-ups, detentions and isolation from the other students during the school day.

Finally, there is the fifth rung. At that level, in consultation with parents, students can choose among corporal punishment, having their parents “shadow” them through a full school day, night school or outright suspension. In 8 cases out of 10, Mr. Price said, the students choose the paddling, although this is allowed only a few times.

“If it’s not changing their behavior, then we figure the pops aren’t working and we try something else,” Mr. Price said.

Mr. Price said he definitely believed there was a “cultural factor” behind the persistence of corporal punishment in some parts of the country after it has disappeared elsewhere.

“You hear people say, Well, you know, it’s in the Bible, don’t spare the rod and spoil the child,” he said.

He uses it, he said, because he believes it works.

“The rule is, never hit in anger,” Mr. Price said. “We always talk to the child before the punishment, make sure they understand why it’s happening, and then talk to them again afterward. None of it is cold or harsh. We try to treat the kids like they’re our own.”

    In Many Public Schools, the Paddle Is No Relic, NYT, 30.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/education/30punish.html?hp&ex=1159675200&en=eedd0ba5e7b78736&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Audit Finds Education Department Missteps

September 22, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:18 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A scorching internal review of the Bush administration's reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted.

The government audit is unsparing in its review of how Reading First, a billion-dollar program each year, that it says has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use.

It also depicts a program in which review panels were stacked with people who shared the director's views and in which only favored publishers of reading curricula could get money.

In one e-mail, the director told a staff member to come down hard on a company he didn't support, according to the report released Friday by the department's inspector general.

''They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the (expletive deleted) out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags,'' the Reading First director wrote, according to the report.

That official, Chris Doherty, is resigning in the coming days, department spokeswoman Katherine McLane said Friday. Asked if his quitting was in response to the report, she said only that Doherty is returning to the private sector after five years at the agency.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, in a statement, pledged to swiftly adopt all of the audit's recommendations. She also pledged a review of every Reading First grant.

''I am concerned about these actions and committed to addressing and resolving them,'' she said.

Reading First aims to help young children read through scientifically-proven programs, and the department considers it a jewel of No Child Left Behind, Bush's education law. Just this week, a separate review found that the effort is helping schools raise achievement.

But from the start, the program has also been dogged by accusations of impropriety, leading to several ongoing audits. The new report from the Office of Inspector General -- an independent arm of the Education Department -- calls into question basic matters of credibility.

When the department fails to follow the law and its own guidance, the report says, ''it can only serve to undermine the public's confidence in the department.''

The ranking Democrat on the House education committee was furious.

''They should fire everyone who was involved in this,'' said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif. ''This was not an accident, this was not an oversight. This was an intentional effort to corrupt the process.''

About 1,500 school districts have received $4.8 billion in Reading First grants.

    Audit Finds Education Department Missteps, NYT, 22.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Reading-First.html?hp&ex=1158984000&en=99ce241aee042229&ei=5094&partner=homepage

More Small Women’s Colleges Opening Doors to Men

September 21, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

LYNCHBURG, Va. — When the board at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College announced its decision this month to admit men, the college’s interim president, Ginger Worden, looked at a distraught student protester nearby, tears rolling down the young woman’s face.

“I’m sorry,” Ms. Worden, an alumna of Randolph-Macon, said she mouthed silently to the student, as tears came to her own eyes.

A moment later, the president and the protester hugged, in quiet commiseration over the demise of single-sex education at a college once known as “the Vassar of the South,” when Vassar enrolled only women.

Decades after Ivy League institutions like Yale and Princeton opened to women, the number of women’s colleges has shrunk from about 300 in the 1960’s to fewer than 60 today. The top institutions that do not admit men — Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Mount Holyoke and Smith — say they are doing fine. But behind them are small liberal arts colleges for women, like Randolph-Macon, increasingly struggling against financial pressures to win applicants in an era of unbounded choice. And in recent months, their numbers have been dwindling precipitously.

Just before Randolph-Macon’s vote, Regis College outside Boston announced that it would begin admitting men next September. At Rutgers University, the women’s undergraduate college, Douglass, will cease to exist as a separate degree-granting institution at the end of this academic year. This spring, Tulane University merged its H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College with the undergraduate college for men.

Wells College, on Cayuga Lake in upstate New York, was established in 1868 and began admitting men last year. And at Marymount College for women in Tarrytown, N.Y., which merged with Fordham University in 2002, next spring’s graduation will be the last, after 100 years.

For these institutions, the decision to admit men is not without risk. Many of the women enrolled are passionate about single-sex education and have bitterly opposed the changes with petitions, protests and lawsuits. Alumnae, who may be even more passionate, have threatened to withhold donations.

But college trustees and administrators say they have little choice. Only 3.4 percent of girls graduating from high school last year who took the SAT said they would apply to women’s colleges, according to the College Board, down from 5 percent 10 years ago.

That statistic is cited over and over by presidents of women’s colleges in interviews about their future. “The market is telling us young women don’t want to come to single-sex colleges,” Ms. Worden said.

She said Randolph-Macon, founded over a century ago, had paid a hefty price for staying single sex. To attract and retain students, she said, the college awards 99 percent of them financial aid, and the typical discount is 62 percent, much of it merit based. That means that despite tuition and fees of more than $30,000, the typical student pays $13,000, Ms. Worden said. These subsidies have been a persistent drain on the $140 million endowment.

Nationally, most women who attend single-sex colleges say they chose their institutions despite the absence of men, not because of it. At Randolph-Macon, 4 in 10 students transfer to other, usually coeducational, colleges or universities.

But among the 6 in 10 who remain, many are fiercely dedicated to attending college without men. “Every single student on this campus has a leadership position in something,” said Anne Haley, a senior who is leading the protesters here. The week after the board’s decision, about 300 students stayed away from classes, and 200 put in requests to transfer to other institutions, a severe blow for a student body of 712, if they follow through.

David W. Strauss, a partner at the Art & Science Group, a marketing firm in Baltimore that has advised all-female colleges, including Randolph-Macon, said his firm’s research suggested that most women, even those attending single-sex colleges, would prefer a coeducational institution. “If you look at this over time,” Mr. Strauss said, “the proportion of college-bound women who say they would consider a women’s-only college has been on a long and steep decline.”

Susan E. Lennon, director of the nonprofit Women’s College Coalition, said the opening of once all-male bastions in the Ivy League and elsewhere and Title IX legislation that ramped up women’s sports programs have made it tougher for women’s colleges to survive. Yet national surveys show that women who attend these institutions are more engaged and successful academically than those in mixed environments, Ms. Lennon said.

Mr. Strauss said women’s colleges often wanted to use this sort of research to present themselves as places where women could thrive without having to compete with men. But that marketing may not work, he said, because potential applicants do not see themselves as needing protection from competition with men.

“Their sense is that the women’s college has something of the broken wing, of women who need a cloistered environment,” he said. “High-performing young women tend to see themselves as high-performing students, and not as students in need of some kind of special care.”

In the uproar over Randolph-Macon’s decision, Sweet Briar College and Hollins University, sister institutions to Randolph-Macon for more than a century, publicly rededicated themselves to remaining single sex.

Elisabeth Showalter Muhlenfeld, president of Sweet Briar, said that since 2004 the college had focused on raising enrollment by emphasizing hands-on experience and opportunities to study abroad. So far, enrollment has grown to just over 600 students, from 557, and Dr. Muhlenfeld said she is hopeful that it can top 700.

Trinity (Washington) University, once a women’s college for upper-crust Roman Catholics, has embraced a new mission of educating low-income women in the Washington region. Virtually all are on financial aid, and the institution manages by attracting large corporate donors.

But at Randolph-Macon, administrators saw no other options.

Ms. Worden, a former chairwoman of the board who stepped in as interim president while Randolph-Macon weighed going coeducational, said she had some regret about the move but was excited about the prospects for growth. But she said the advantage of an all-women’s campus was apparent even in the current protests. Though the two sides are at loggerheads, there is no undercurrent of enmity or animosity.

Before the board’s vote, some protesters gave her a hug, along with a school mascot puppet, a toy bomb and a bottle of calamine lotion, “in case things got too irritating,” she said. The protesters presented an alternative plan that would have preserved the women’s-only campus to the board the night before its vote.

In all this, Ms. Worden sees women finding their own path toward negotiating and protesting — purposeful, balanced and constructive.

Undoubtedly, there is a place for women’s colleges. What is missing, she said, is the market for it.

    More Small Women’s Colleges Opening Doors to Men, NYT, 21.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/education/21women.html

Debate Grows as Colleges Slip in Graduations

September 15, 2006
The New York Times
By ALAN FINDER

CHICAGO — When a research group started tracking what happens to Chicago’s public school graduates after they enter college, it came upon a startling and dispiriting finding: the graduation rates at two of the city’s four-year public universities were among the worst in the country.

At Northeastern Illinois University, a tidy commuter campus on the North Side of Chicago, only 17 percent of students who enroll as full-time freshmen graduate within six years, according to data collected by the federal Department of Education. At Chicago State University on the South Side, the overall graduation rate is 16 percent.

As dismal as those rates seem, the universities are not unique. About 50 colleges across the country have a six-year graduation rate below 20 percent, according to the Education Trust, a nonprofit research group. Many of the institutions serve low-income and minority students.

Such numbers have prompted a fierce debate here — and in national education circles — about who is to blame for the results, whether they are acceptable for nontraditional students, and how universities should be held accountable if the vast majority of students do not graduate.

“If you’re accepting a child into your institution, don’t you have the responsibility to make sure they graduate?” asked Melissa Roderick, the co-director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research, which produced the study.

“I think people had absolutely no idea that our local colleges were running graduation rates like that,” Dr. Roderick said. “I don’t think we have any high school in the city that has graduation rates like these colleges.”

Northeastern’s results were particularly low among African-Americans, with only 8 percent of entering full-time freshmen earning degrees within six years.

The report, which was released last spring, examined students who graduated from Chicago public schools in 1998, 1999, 2002 and 2003. It also cited federal statistics showing that only 4 percent of all African-American students at Northeastern Illinois graduated within six years. The most recent federal data, released in August, shows the figure to be 8 percent for freshmen who entered in 1999 and would have graduated by 2005.

A federal commission that examined the future of American higher education recommended in August that colleges and universities take more responsibility for ensuring that students complete their education. Charles Miller, the commission chairman, said that if graduation rates were more readily available, universities would be forced to pay more attention to them.

“Universities in America rank themselves on many factors, but graduation rates aren’t even in the mix,” Mr. Miller said. “They don’t talk about it.”

Others say policy makers are to blame for failing to take action against public universities or administrators if most of their students fail to earn a degree.

“Most colleges aren’t held accountable in any way for their graduation rate,” said Gary Orfield, a Harvard professor of education and social policy at the Graduate School of Education. “We treat college as if the right to enroll is enough, and just ignore everything else.”

Kevin Carey, the research and policy manager at the Education Sector, a nonprofit research organization, said governors and legislatures could make it clear that the presidents’ continued employment hinged on improving graduation rates. “That’s what businesses do,” he said.

“When you have a system where virtually everyone fails, how is that different from designing a system in which the point is for people to fail?” Mr. Carey added. “No one can look at that and say this is the best we can do.”

Officials in Illinois are considering whether to provide financial incentives to universities that show progress on improving graduation rates, said Judy Erwin, executive director of the Illinois Board of Higher Education.

The presidents of Northeastern Illinois and Chicago State, both part of the state university system, robustly defend their institutions. They say the universities serve a valuable mission, educating untraditional students who often take a long time to complete course work.

Many of their students are the first in their families to go to college, they said. Many come ill prepared. Often the students are older, have children and work full time.

“I think the work of this institution should be lauded rather than criticized,” said Elnora D. Daniel, the president of Chicago State, where 86 percent of the 7,300 students are African-American. “And I say that for all public institutions nationally that attract and have as part of their mission the education of low-income, disadvantaged minorities.”

Dr. Daniel also said that conventional methods for calculating graduation rates significantly understate how many students actually earn degrees. Universities calculate how many freshmen who enrolled as full-time students six years earlier have graduated. Students who transfer to other universities do not count as graduates, even if they graduate from another institution. Nor do students who transfer into the university and eventually graduate.

About half of the undergraduates at both universities have transferred in from other institutions, primarily community colleges, officials said.

The presidents also said that six years is not always a fair standard.

“That it takes another year or two years longer should be a mark of distinction,” said Salme Harju Steinberg, the president of Northeastern Illinois. “That person should be commended for the remarkable effort that he is making.”

Nearly half of the 12,200 students at Northeastern Illinois attend part time, Dr. Steinberg said. “They have families to support,” she said. “So of course it’s going to take longer.” About 43 percent are white, according to federal data, 29 percent are Hispanic, and 12 percent are African-American.

The graduation rate at Chicago State after seven years is nearly 35 percent, compared with the six-year rate of 16 percent, Dr. Daniel said. At Northeastern Illinois, where the six-year rate is 17 percent, the 10-year rate is 23 percent, university officials said.

Programs to mentor and tutor untraditional students are essential for their success, many educators said. But such programs are expensive, and in the past four years in Illinois, the state’s contribution to public universities declined 16 percent, Dr. Steinberg said.

“It is important to make sure that institutions of this type do indeed have the financial wherewithal to meet the needs of these special students,” Dr. Daniel said, “and so often that is not the case.”

The nature of their student bodies does not completely explain the rates at Northeastern Illinois and Chicago State. Some comparable universities with similar students have significantly higher graduation rates, academic experts said, and there are lessons to be learned from them.

The six-year rate at York College in Queens, a branch of the City University of New York, is 30 percent, for example, and it is 34 percent at Lehman College, a CUNY unit in the Bronx.

“There are certain things that stand out about institutions that do better than you would expect,” said Vincent Tinto, a professor of education at Syracuse University. “One is that they are willing to commit resources and to align their resources in a systematic way. Two, they understand the importance of support for student academic success.”

At Elizabeth City State University, a historically black institution in North Carolina, the graduation rate is 49 percent. Class attendance is mandatory, and everyone on campus helps enforce the rules and support the students, said Carolyn R. Mahoney, a former provost and vice chancellor at Elizabeth City who is now president of Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo.

At Murray State University in Murray, Ky., the graduation rate increased to 57 percent from 43 percent during the first half of the decade. F. King Alexander, who was president at the time, made graduation a central theme. Among other things, he encouraged commuting students to spend more time on campus, because students involved in extra-curricular activities are more likely to finish college.

“They have to think about graduation from the day they walk on campus,” said Dr. Alexander, now the president of California State University, Long Beach.

That is not always the prime focus for students at Northeastern Illinois. Afifa Amin, 24, began college in 2000. She transferred to Northeastern Illinois two years ago, switched her major several times and took a year off from school.

Now a part-time student majoring in computer science, Ms. Amin hopes to graduate in 2009. “I know it’s a long time, nine years,” she said, “but it’s better than not graduating.”

    Debate Grows as Colleges Slip in Graduations, NYT, 15.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/15/education/15graduate.html?hp&ex=1158379200&en=00832695f51ea423&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Outsourcing Homework

At $9.95 a Page, You Expected Poetry?

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By CHARLES McGRATH

THE Web site for an outfit called Term Paper Relief features a picture of a young college student chewing her lip.

“Damn!” a little comic-strip balloon says. “I’ll have to cancel my Saturday night date to finish my term paper before the Monday deadline.”

Well, no, she won’t — not if she’s enterprising enough to enlist Term Paper Relief to write it for her. For $9.95 a page she can obtain an “A-grade” paper that is fashioned to order and “completely non-plagiarized.” This last detail is important. Thanks to search engines like Google, college instructors have become adept at spotting those shop-worn, downloadable papers that circulate freely on the Web, and can even finger passages that have been ripped off from standard texts and reference works.

A grade-conscious student these days seems to need a custom job, and to judge from the number of services on the Internet, there must be virtual mills somewhere employing armies of diligent scholars who grind away so that credit-card-equipped undergrads can enjoy more carefree time together.

How good are the results? With first semester just getting under way at most colleges, bringing with it the certain prospect of both academic and social pressure, The Times decided to undertake an experiment in quality control of the current offerings. Using her own name and her personal e-mail address, an editor ordered three English literature papers from three different sites on standard, often-assigned topics: one comparing and contrasting Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Orwell’s “1984”; one discussing the nature of Ophelia’s madness in “Hamlet”; and one exploring the theme of colonialism in Conrad’s “Lord Jim.”

A small sample, perhaps, but one sufficient, upon perusal, to suggest that papers written to order are just like the ones students write for themselves, only more so — they’re poorly organized, awkwardly phrased, thin on substance, but masterly in the ancient arts of padding and stating and restating the obvious.

If they’re delivered, that is. The “Lord Jim” essay, ordered from SuperiorPapers.com, never arrived, despite repeated entreaties, and the excuse finally offered was a high-tech variant of “The dog ate my homework.” The writer assigned to the task, No. 3323, was “obviously facing some technical difficulties,” an e-mail message explained, “and cannot upload your paper.” The message went on to ask for a 24-hour extension, the wheeziest stratagem in the procrastinator’s arsenal, invented long before the electronic age.

The two other papers came in on time, and each grappled, more or less, with the assigned topic. The Orwell/Huxley essay, prepared by Term Paper Relief and a relative bargain at $49.75 for five pages, begins: “Although many similarities exist between Aldous Huxley’s ‘A Brave New World’ and George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ the works books [sic] though they deal with similar topics, are more dissimilar than alike.” That’s certainly a relief, because we couldn’t have an essay if they weren’t.

Elsewhere the author proves highly adept with the “on the one hand/on the other” formula, one of the most valuable tools for a writer concerned with attaining his assigned word count, and says, for example, of “Brave New World”: “Many people consider this Huxley’s most important work: many others think it is his only work. This novel has been praised and condemned, vilified and glorified, a source of controversy, a subject for sermons, and required reading for many high school students and college undergraduates. This novel has had twenty-seven printings in the United States alone and will probably have twenty-seven more.”

The obvious point of comparison between the two novels is that where Orwell’s world is an authoritarian, police-state nightmare, Huxley’s dystopia is ostensibly a paradise, with drugs and sex available on demand. A clever student might even pick up some extra credit by pointing out that while Orwell meant his book as a kind of predictive warning, it is Huxley’s world, much more far-fetched at the time of writing, that now more nearly resembles our own.

The essay never exactly makes these points, though it gets close a couple of times, declaring at one point that “the two works vary greatly.” It also manages to remind us that Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair and that both he and his book “are misunderstood to this day.”

The paper does makes a number of embarrassing spelling errors (“dissention,” “anti-semetic”) but William H. Pritchard, an English professor at Amherst, who read the paper at The Times’s request, shrewdly suggested that, in this day of spell check, they may have been included deliberately, to throw suspicious teachers off the track. If confronted with such a paper from one of his own students, he wrote in an e-mail message, he probably wouldn’t grade it at all but would instead say “come see me” (shuddering at the prospect).

The Hamlet essay was a trick assignment, or perhaps a poorly worded one. Ophelia’s genuine madness, as opposed to Hamlet’s feigned craziness, has become a touchstone in Shakespeare studies, especially among feminist and gender studies scholars who read in Ophelia’s songs and fragmentary utterances a coded response to the irrationality and sexual repression of the Elizabethan patriarchy.

The author of the four-page paper, supplied by Go-Essays for $127.96, approaches the question more literally and concludes, not incorrectly, that Ophelia is literally driven crazy by her father, brother and lover — or as the essay puts it: “Thus, in critical review of the play, Ophelia mentally suffers from the scars of unwanted love and exploitation rather than any singular or isolated cause.”

The paper goes on to repeat this point with so much plot summary and quotation from the text that it soars right to the assigned length. It’s also written in language so stilted and often ungrammatical (“Hamlet is obviously hurt by Ophelia’s lack of affection to his vows of love”) that it suggests the author may not be a native speaker of English, and even makes you suspect that some of these made-to-order term papers are written by the very same people who pick up the phone when you call to complain about your credit card bill.

Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar at Harvard and a confessed “soft touch,” said the grade he would give this paper “would depend, at least to some extent, on whether I thought I was reading the work of a green freshman — in which case I would probably give it a D+ and refer the student to the writing lab for counseling — or an English major, in which case I would simply fail it.”

He added: “If I had paid for this, I would demand my money back.”

As it happens, a refund is just what Superior Papers offered, along with a 10 percent discount on a new paper. Term paper writing is an arduous business, we need to remember, and we shouldn’t expect too much. As the author of the Orwell/Huxley essay says: “It is so often that one wants something and in wanting romanticizes it, thus bringing disappointment when the end is finally obtained. They serve as a reminder that it is necessary to have pain to compare with joy, defeat to compare with victory, and problems in order to have solutions.”

    At $9.95 a Page, You Expected Poetry?, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/weekinreview/10mcgrath.html

At 2-Year Colleges, Students Eager but Unready

September 2, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

DUNDALK, Md. — At first, Michael Walton, starting at community college here, was sure that there was some mistake. Having done so well in high school in West Virginia that he graduated a year and a half early, how could he need remedial math?

Eighteen and temperamental, Mickey, as everyone calls him, hounded the dean, insisting that she take another look at his placement exam. The dean stood firm. Mr. Walton’s anger grew. He took the exam a second time. Same result.

“I flipped out big time,’’ Mr. Walton said.

Because he had no trouble balancing his checkbook, he took himself for a math wiz. But he could barely remember the Pythagorean theorem and had trouble applying sine, cosine and tangent to figure out angles on the geometry questions.

Mr. Walton is not unusual. As the new school year begins, the nation’s 1,200 community colleges are being deluged with hundreds of thousands of students unprepared for college-level work.

Though higher education is now a near-universal aspiration, researchers suggest that close to half the students who enter college need remedial courses.

The shortfalls persist despite high-profile efforts by public universities to crack down on ill-prepared students.

Since the City University of New York, the largest urban public university, barred students who need remediation from attending its four-year colleges in 1999, others have followed with similar steps.

California State set an ambitious goal to cut the proportion of unprepared freshmen to 10 percent by 2007, largely by testing them as high school juniors and having them make up for deficiencies in the 12th grade.

Cal State appears nowhere close to its goal. In reading alone, nearly half the high school juniors appear unprepared for college-level work.

Aside from New York City’s higher education system, at least 12 states explicitly bar state universities from providing remedial courses or take other steps like deferred admissions to steer students needing helping toward technical or community colleges.

Some students who need to catch up attend two- and four-year institutions simultaneously.

The efforts, educators say, have not cut back on the thousands of students who lack basic skills. Instead, the colleges have clustered those students in community colleges, where their chances of succeeding are low and where taxpayers pay a second time to bring them up to college level.

The phenomenon has educators struggling with fundamental questions about access to education, standards and equal opportunity.

Michael W. Kirst, a Stanford professor who was a co-author of a report on the gap between aspirations and college attainment, said that 73 percent of students entering community colleges hoped to earn four-year degrees, but that only 22 percent had done so after six years.

“You can get into school,” Professor Kirst said. “That’s not a problem. But you can’t succeed.’’

Nearly half the 14.7 million undergraduates at two- and four-year institutions never receive degrees. The deficiencies turn up not just in math, science and engineering, areas in which a growing chorus warns of difficulties in the face of global competition, but also in the basics of reading and writing.

According to scores on the 2006 ACT college entrance exam, 21 percent of students applying to four-year institutions are ready for college-level work in all four areas tested, reading, writing, math and biology.

For many students, the outlook does not improve after college. The Pew Charitable Trusts recently found that three-quarters of community college graduates were not literate enough to handle everyday tasks like comparing viewpoints in newspaper editorials or calculating the cost of food items per ounce.

The unyielding statistics showcase a deep disconnection between what high school teachers think that their students need to know and what professors, even at two-year colleges, expect them to know.

At Cal State, the system admits only students with at least a B average in high school. Nevertheless, 37 percent of the incoming class last year needed remedial math, and 45 percent needed remedial English.

“Students are still shocked when they’re told they need developmental courses,’’ said Donna McKusik, the senior director of developmental, or remedial, education at the Community College of Baltimore County. “They think they graduated from a high school, they should be ready for college.’’

Across the nation, federal and state education officials are pressing for a K-16 vision of education that runs from kindergarten through college graduation. Such an approach, they say, would help high schools better prepare students for college.

In Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush appointed a Board of Regents to oversee education at all public institutions, from elementary through bachelor’s programs. At Cal State, professors are advising 12th-grade teachers on preparing students to succeed in college.

Starting at a Deficit

As the debate rages, nearly half of all students seeking degrees begin their journeys at community colleges much like the Dundalk campus of the Community College of Baltimore County, two-story no-frills buildings named by letters, not benefactors or grateful alumni. The college’s interim vice chancellor for learning and developmental education, Alvin Starr, said he saw students who passed through high school never having read a book cover to cover.

“They’ve listened in class, taken notes and taken the test off of that,’’ Dr. Starr said.

Though remedial needs are high, Dr. Starr said, the courses offer something invaluable, the chance to overcome basic deficiencies in reading, writing or math.

“You have to figure the cost to society on the other side if you don’t educate these students,’’ he said.

Most of the students expect the transition to community college to be seamless. But the first, and sometimes last, stop for many are remedial math classes.

“It’s the math that’s killing us,’’ Dr. McKusik said.

The sheer numbers of enrollees like Mr. Walton who have to take make-up math is overwhelming, with 8,000 last year among the nearly 30,000 degree-seeking students systemwide. Not all those students come directly from high school. Many have taken off a few years and may have forgotten what they learned, Dr. McKusik said.

More than one in four remedial students work on elementary and middle school arithmetic. Math is where students often lose confidence and give up.

“It brings up a lot of emotional stuff for them,’’ Dr. McKusik said.

She told of 20 students who had just burst into tears on receiving their math entrance exam scores and walked out on college. Mr. Walton remembers a fellow student who failed to hand in a math assignment for the fourth time in the last week of class and learned that he would fail. The student lunged toward the professor and said, “I’ll kill you.”

“You can say whatever you want, but this really isn’t helping your grade,” the professor replied, Mr. Walton said.

The student stormed out the door with a final expletive, leaving the professor shaken.

Fear of Appearing Ignorant

The biggest challenge, professors say, is trying to engage students, to persuade them that ideas matter. Dr. McKusik suspects that behind the apathy is a fear of appearing ignorant.

“Everything in society is geared to celebrate, to value, the winner,” she said. “These are students who haven’t been at the top. They won’t show themselves as vulnerable at all.’’

With most students having commitments to jobs and families, community colleges typically offer little in the way of a social life or school spirit. So they need to find ways to reach their less traditional audience.

“That’s why we’re trying to use pop culture in the classroom, to get their attention,’’ said Betsy Gooden, an English teacher who, in a remedial reading class one day last spring, tried to coax students to discuss a television documentary.

Two or three students in a class of 10 women carried most of the discussion, which seemed more like Ricky Lake than Lit 101, with students reacting to the film almost exclusively in terms of their personal experiences.

They covered love, sex and cheating boyfriends. Before the class was over, two women disclosed that they had been raped. About half the students said nothing at all.

Karen Olson, a history professor, and David Truscello, who teaches English, are trying another common strategy, mixing remedial work with other subjects. They are co-teachers of a course that combines African-American history with composition.

Professor Olson says teachers should stop making “unrealistic assignments’’ like chapters from “600-page textbooks’’ and should meet students at their level, raising abilities by degrees.

In her class, she assigns more manageable readings and carves up the load, so no student is responsible for doing it all.

“It’s not like they’re living four years in a dorm,’’ Professor Truscello said.

Most are working, sometimes at more than one job.

“That impinges on everything,’’ he added. “I have students who take two buses to come to school. It’s amazing that they do it.’’

Solutions and Successes

Another part of the solution at community colleges is in Student Success Centers. They are actually tutoring centers. Dundalk’s is opens 63 hours a week.

Along a wall is a rack of handouts explaining points of grammar that might have last been explicitly taught in middle school, a measure of the immense ground to be made up. One covers comparative adjectives, explaining “more” vs. “most” or “smarter” vs. “smartest.” Another discusses using pronouns and verb tenses.

At one table, Kirn Shahzadi, 20, once an A student at Parkville High School, was being tutored a few hours before her final in remedial algebra. In addition to math, Ms. Shahzadi needed remedial courses in reading and one in helping with basic skills like note taking, researching and organizing schedules. By the second week of that course, she said, half the students had dropped out.

Still, the school has winners who make it through and feel that they have to fit into the changing workplace.

Mr. Walton said careers like his father’s as a welder for a major construction company were now harder to find. His father rose to foreman, putting Mr. Walton’s older brother through Johns Hopkins University.

Mr. Walton, who married soon after high school, put himself through the Baltimore community college working as a security guard at $7.80 an hour. He has had shoplifters pull knives on him and spray him with Mace, he said.

His salary covered the utilities and phone bills, and left his wife, an administrative assistant at Johns Hopkins, to pay the mortgage. He added that at times he suspected that she had felt more like a caretaker than a wife, and he worried for their future.

“I know she’s sick and tired of taking care of me,’’ he said in May. “It’s rip-your-hair-out-at-night difficult.’’

But Mr. Walton made it through that remedial math class four years ago, ultimately praising the dean for standing firm. In June, he crossed a stage to receive an associate’s degree in computer science. Next year, he plans to earn another degree in, of all things, math.

He said he would like to earn a full bachelor’s, but hesitates.

“I’m scared to death of going to college,’’ he said. “I’ll be up to my eyeballs in debt.’’

This summer he sent his résumé even to employers demanding bachelor’s degrees and several years’ experience, hoping that his enthusiasm would compensate where credentials fell short. He sought positions that included tuition breaks for employees.

His strategy paid off with two offers, one in data entry at the community college here, a job he held on work study before graduating, and another as a technician repairing copying machines. Mr. Walton went for the second.

It offers benefits, tuition reimbursement and a salary of $22,850 a year, with extra money toward buying a new car every few years.

“I feel a little bit more — I don’t want to say confident — but maybe worthy,’’ Mr. Walton said. “Now, I feel like I’m all that, and a bag of chips.’’

    At 2-Year Colleges, Students Eager but Unready, NYT, 2.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/education/02college.html?hp&ex=1157256000&en=641519fb82edd42c&ei=5094&partner=homepage