History > 2006 > USA > Education (IV-VI)

Public Universities Chase Excellence,

at a Price

December 20, 2006
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — If there is any goal that the University of Florida has pursued as fervently as a national football championship for the Gators, it is a place among the nation’s highest-ranked public universities.

“We need a top-10 university, so our kids can get the same education they would get at Harvard or Yale,” said J. Bernard Machen, the university president.

To upgrade the university, Dr. Machen is seeking a $1,000 tuition surcharge that would be used mostly to hire more professors and lower the student-faculty ratio, not coincidentally one of the factors in the much-watched college rankings published annually by U.S. News & World Report. This year, that list ranked Florida 13th among public universities in the United States.

Like Florida, more leading public universities are striving for national status and drawing increasingly impressive and increasingly affluent students, sometimes using financial aid to lure them. In the process, critics say, many are losing force as engines of social mobility, shortchanging low-income and minority students, who are seriously underrepresented on their campuses.

“Public universities were created to make excellence available to all qualified students,” said Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, an advocacy group, “but that commitment appears to have diminished over time, as they choose to use their resources to try to push up their rankings. It’s all about reputation, selectivity and ranking, instead of about the mission of finding and educating future leaders from their state.”

While a handful of public universities have long stood among the nation’s top institutions — the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan among them — many have only recently joined their ranks.

At some of the best public universities, selectivity is up: at the University of Florida, the average student high school grade point average now exceeds 4.0, a feat achievable only with high grades in honors or Advanced Placement classes. And student interest in these institutions is soaring. At the University of Vermont, where three quarters of the freshmen come from other states, applications have more than doubled since 2001.

The demands on such universities are growing, too, particularly with many states questioning their spending on higher education. Increasingly, these colleges are expected to bolster their states’ economies by attracting research grants and jobs. To do that, they say, they must compete with elite private universities.

So the universities face a tough balancing act: should they push for higher status and higher tuition revenue by accepting more top-achieving, out-of-state students, or should they worry about broadening access for low-income, in-state students? Is their primary goal to serve the people of their state or to compete nationally with private research universities? Can they leave the less prestigious state colleges to serve the bulk of in-state students?

“It is increasingly challenging to manage all of those inherently conflicting goals,” said Mark A. Emmert, president of the University of Washington, adding that global competitiveness required world-class scholarship: “When we think about our peers now, we don’t just think about the publics, we throw in Stanford and the Ivies.”

In some ways, the University of Washington outdoes its peers. Dr. Emmert says proudly that his university is second only to Harvard in research financing from the National Institutes of Health.

In certain respects, flagship public universities have become more like private institutions. Public universities are still far less expensive, but with their tuition rising rapidly, enrolling low-income students has become as much an issue for them as it is for private universities.

From 1995 to 2003, flagship and leading public research universities quadrupled their aid to students from families with incomes over $100,000, while aid to students from the poorest families declined, according to the Education Trust. The best public universities, the group said, have come to resemble “gated communities of higher education.”

And their aid policies are paramount, because aid given by the universities dwarfs what students get from the federal government.

“The rise in the quality of public flagships across the country is in principle a good thing,” said William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland. “What’s begun to cross the line, though, is when in the pursuit of excellence, our financial aid gets distorted in a way that high-achieving, low-income students who are qualified to go to our best public institutions can’t.”

In an implicit recognition of this distortion, several public universities have started programs to help low-income students.

The Carolina Covenant at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was the first such program. Started in 2004, it guaranteed low-income students enough aid to graduate debt-free.

This year about 8 percent of the freshman class qualified, in the process helping diversify the student body, which for the first time is less than 70 percent white.

The University of Virginia followed with a similar program. And just this fall, the University of Washington did as well.

The University of Florida, as much as any, is grappling with these issues.

“Florida wants a top-10 university because it’s clear that our economic development is increasingly tied to research,” said Dr. Machen, the president. “The state’s fired up to invest in this university when it sees our projects with the Burnham Institute for Medical Research and Scripps Research Institute.”

The university’s financial situation is unique: it has the lowest tuition of the flagships, $3,206 a year. In addition, the state pays 75 percent to 100 percent of tuition and fees for students with high grades and test scores, including more than 90 percent of freshmen.

Still, the students at the sprawling Gainesville campus, with its historic buildings, lawns and lush vegetation, are so affluent that those who must work to help support themselves are sometimes put off by the fancy cars, the stylish clothes and what they see as a sense of entitlement around them.

“The way they dress, what they talk about, the ‘I drive this, I drive that,’ it gets annoying,” said Angela Momprevil, a sophomore whose parents, Haitian immigrant business owners, did not attend college.

Dr. Machen said that when he became president of the university in 2004, he was troubled to discover that the average student’s family income was about $100,000.

“That bothered me because public education is supposed to be a ladder to success,” Dr. Machen said. “We don’t want to be an elitist institution. We want to be a mirror of society.”

Ever since, he said, he has struggled to balance the quest for higher rankings with the push to serve minority and low-income students. Two of the university’s efforts, the tuition surcharge and a new program for low-income students, could almost stand as the yin and yang of his agenda.

Dr. Machen said the university needed the surcharge to supplement its inexpensive tuition and bring in 200 new faculty members.

“How can I tell parents that the education their children can get here is on a par with Michigan or North Carolina,” he said, “when my student-teacher ratio is 21 or 22 to 1, and Michigan’s is 15 to 1, Chapel Hill’s 14 to 1?”

The surcharge proposal, for next year’s new students, has caused little upset on campus and was endorsed by the Student Senate. But some students had concerns.

“I worry that there will be highly qualified students who won’t be able to pay an extra $1,000,” said Sal Picataggio, a junior. “It’s a fine line. I want it to be prestigious, to be top 10, but I also want it to be more accessible.”

Even as the cost of education at the University of Florida goes up, Dr. Machen is working to bring in more low-income students.

“We found a significant number of accepted students, from the families of the working poor, who didn’t come because they didn’t have the money to pay the costs,” he said. “Loans weren’t attractive to them, and we wanted them here.”

So this fall, the university started a program covering the full cost of college, living expenses included, for students from families with incomes under $40,000, if neither parent went to college. The program also attracted more minority students, helping to raise the proportion of blacks among this year’s freshmen to more than 13 percent, from about 10 percent in the two previous years.

“It turns out that using ‘first generation in the family to go to college’ is a pretty good surrogate for diversity,” Dr. Machen said.

The university is also cutting back merit aid. For years, Gainesville paid dearly to attract National Merit scholars, the students who scored highest on the Preliminary SAT exams. Scholars from out of state pay no tuition at the University of Florida and receive an additional $38,000 over four years.

As a result, the school has drawn hundreds of merit scholars, sometimes nearly as many as Harvard. But next fall, the amount of those awards will be cut to $17,000 for out-of-staters.

“It gave us a kind of bragging rights,” Dr. Machen said, “but it didn’t help in the world of our peers, because they knew we were buying them.”

This is higher-education code: peer ratings are the largest component of the U.S. News & World Report rankings, so anything that does not impress other educators is not likely to help the rankings.

Manny A. Fernandez, chairman of the board at the University of Florida, talks as frankly as Dr. Machen about rankings.

“I want to be on the cocktail-party list of schools that people talk about, because that influences the decisions of great students and great faculty,” Mr. Fernandez said. “I don’t apologize for trying to get the rankings up, because rankings are a catalyst for changes that improve the school.”

    Public Universities Chase Excellence, at a Price, NYT, 20.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/education/20colleges.html?hp&ex=1166677200&en=8286211a2ea13023&ei=5094&partner=homepage

In Tuition Game, Popularity Rises With Price

December 12, 2006
The New York Times
By JONATHAN D. GLATER and ALAN FINDER

COLLEGEVILLE, Pa. — John Strassburger, the president of Ursinus College, a small liberal arts institution here in the eastern Pennsylvania countryside, vividly remembers the day that the chairman of the board of trustees told him the college was losing applicants because of its tuition.

It was too low.

So early in 2000 the board voted to raise tuition and fees 17.6 percent, to $23,460 (and to include a laptop for every incoming student to help soften the blow). Then it waited to see what would happen.

Ursinus received nearly 200 more applications than the year before. Within four years the size of the freshman class had risen 35 percent, to 454 students. Applicants had apparently concluded that if the college cost more, it must be better.

“It’s bizarre and it’s embarrassing, but it’s probably true,” Dr. Strassburger said.

Ursinus also did something more: it raised student aid by nearly 20 percent, to just under $12.9 million, meaning that a majority of its students paid less than half price.

Ursinus is not unique. With the race for rankings and choice students shaping college pricing, the University of Notre Dame, Bryn Mawr College, Rice University, the University of Richmond and Hendrix College, in Conway, Ark., are just a few that have sharply increased tuition to match colleges they consider their rivals, while also providing more financial assistance.

The recognition that families associate price with quality, and that a tuition rise, accompanied by discounts, can lure more applicants and revenue, has helped produce an economy in academe something like that in the health care system, with prices rising faster than inflation but with many consumers paying less than full price.

Average tuition at private, nonprofit four-year colleges — the price leaders — rose 81 percent from 1993 to 2004 , more than double the inflation rate, according to the College Board, while campus-based financial aid rose 135 percent.

The average cost of tuition, fees, room and board at those colleges is now $30,367. Many charge much more; at George Washington University, the sum is more than $49,000.

But aid is now so extensive that more than 73 percent of undergraduates attending private four-year institutions received it in the school year that ended in 2004, not even counting loans.

“We can cushion the sticker shock,” said Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, which distributes aid on the basis of financial need. “We focus on both middle-income and low-income families.”

So net prices vary widely on a given campus. On some, as many as 90 percent of students receive support, primarily from the college itself or the federal government.

And financial need is not the only basis for it. Many colleges, competing for the students with high grades and standardized test scores that help a college rise in rankings guides, offer merit aid ranging from a few thousand dollars to a full scholarship.

But officials of private colleges and universities say they fear that unless other steps are taken, the middle and upper middle class could ultimately be squeezed out.

“Eventually, if we’re going to keep raising tuition at rates much more than the increase in family incomes, then something has to be done to make the places more accessible to the middle class,” said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.

As it is, some students may not even apply to private colleges, scared away from the start by tuition and unaware of the available discounts. After all, tuition and fees at public colleges and universities — though growing recently at a faster pace than those at private institutions — remain vastly lower, at an average of $5,836, the College Board says.

It can be argued that everyone studying at a private liberal arts college is getting a discount. At institution after institution, officials say they offer an education costing tens of thousands of dollars more than even the college’s “sticker price.”

Take Swarthmore, the elite college half an hour’s drive from Ursinus. With an annual budget of $106 million to educate just under 1,500 undergraduates, Swarthmore spends about $73,690 a student. But its tuition, room, board and fees in the last academic year were little more than $41,000.

“The half of our student body whose families are paying the full sticker price are paying $41,000 for something that costs $73,000,” said Suzanne P. Welsh, the treasurer. “So they’re getting a great discount.”

The other students receive a bigger subsidy: on average, aid totaling more than $28,500, most of it from the college itself. (Swarthmore limits its aid to students with financial need, but that can mean those from families earning $150,000 a year if, for instance, there are circumstances like having multiple children in college.)

What makes it all work is Swarthmore’s $1.3 billion endowment, which throws off enough income to cover 43 percent of the operating budget.

The biggest expenditure at liberal arts colleges is for salaries and benefits. With competition for big-name professors becoming more intense, faculty salaries have increased. So has the pay of college and university presidents, more than 100 of whom now receive at least $500,000 a year.

Then there are the amenities sought by students: coffee bars, lavish new dormitories, state-of-the-art science laboratories and fitness centers.

“You’re trying to create the best educational experience for your students, and that costs money,” said Tom Tritton, president of Haverford College. “I sometimes say to parents, ‘I can make it cheaper if you want.’ ”

Still, none of this explains why colleges like Swarthmore and Ursinus — with different student-faculty ratios, endowments and reputations — end up with tuition and fees only a few hundred dollars apart, or less. Or why Harvard’s tuition and fees, at $33,709, are virtually the same as theirs.

One big reason is that institutions of higher learning watch one another.

In November, the finance committee of Swarthmore’s board of managers gathered at a Manhattan law firm and pored over a chart of tuition, room and board at more than 30 prestigious colleges and universities. They were pleased to see that Swarthmore was charging somewhat less than most of its competitors.

That kind of scrutiny led Bryn Mawr to a contrary sentiment, causing the college to raise tuition and fees this year by about 9 percent, their biggest jump in several years. Bryn Mawr officials say they made the decision after their research showed that the college charged less than its rivals and awarded more aid. The officials concluded that raising tuition would not deter applicants, because prospective students already assumed that Bryn Mawr cost the same as comparable colleges.

“The question was, Does that make sense?” said John Griffith, Bryn Mawr’s treasurer and chief financial officer. “Have we benefited at all from being the low price point? And the answer was no.”

Some of the nation’s bigger institutions have also found an incentive to raise prices. As part of an effort to improve its academic offerings and transcend its renown for football, the University of Notre Dame has raised tuition and fees by an inflation-adjusted 27 percent since 1999, to $32,900. In setting tuition, Notre Dame watches 20 other colleges and universities, including the University of Chicago, Emory and Vanderbilt.

“We’re setting it by our competitors,” said the Rev. John I. Jenkins, the institution’s president.

But Notre Dame’s financial aid has increased even more over the same period, with undergraduate scholarships up 107 percent after adjustment for inflation. This year the university is distributing $68 million.

Facing stiff competition, Hendrix College, a small liberal arts institution in Conway, Ark., decided two years ago to bolster its academic offerings, promising students at least three hands-on experiences outside the classroom, including research, internships and service projects. It also raised tuition and fees 29 percent, to $21,636. Most of the increase went back to students as aid.

As a result, 409 students enrolled in the freshman class this year, a 37 percent increase.

“What worked was the buzz,” said J. Timothy Cloyd, the Hendrix president. “Students saw that they were going to get an experience that had value, and the price positioning conveyed to them the value of the experience.”

Other colleges have tried the opposite. Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, cut tuition and fees drastically in 1996, to $10,285 from $14,240.

“We believed that if we lowered tuition, we would open access to the middle class” and “that we would continue to serve the higher socioeconomic-background students by becoming a best-buy institution,” said Anne C. Steele, Muskingum’s president.

Revenue increased, with enrollment of more students who could pay full price. Muskingum has also grown, to 1,600 undergraduates from about 1,000.

Yet the same strategy proved disastrous for North Carolina Wesleyan College. Ten years ago that college cut tuition and fees by 22 percent, to $7,150. But it attracted fewer wealthy applicants and more poor ones, who needed more aid even as the revenue generated from tuition declined.

“It didn’t work out the way it had been hoped,” said Ian David Campbell Newbould, the college’s president. “People don’t want cheap.”

But they do apparently want a deal, or at least the perception of one. Lucie Lapovsky, a consultant who was once president of Mercy College in New York, conducted a study asking students to choose between a college charging $20,000 and offering no aid, and one charging $30,000 and offering a $10,000 scholarship. Students chose the pricier option.

“Americans seem to like college on sale,” Dr. Lapovsky said.

Many administrators say that without raising prices, they could not maintain or expand economic diversity among the student body. In other words, making college more expensive for some enables less well off students to go.

But Brian Zucker, president of the Human Capital Research Corporation, a consulting firm that works with colleges, is suspicious of that argument, particularly given the growth of merit aid. He points out that many middle-class students borrow tens of thousands of dollars to attend liberal arts colleges and that at some, they may be helping defray the cost of a merit scholarship to a wealthier applicant.

“It’s not a given that the subsidy is going in any predetermined direction,” Mr. Zucker said. “We don’t know.”

Jonathan D. Glater reported from Collegeville, Pa., and Alan Finder from New York.

    In Tuition Game, Popularity Rises With Price, NYT, 12.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/education/12tuition.html?hp&ex=1165986000&en=9fef9f6620b8c02e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Editorial

Why the Achievement Gap Persists

December 8, 2006
The New York Times
 

The No Child Left Behind education act, which requires the states to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students in exchange for federal aid, has been under heavy fire since it was passed five years ago. Critics, some of whom never wanted accountability in the first place, have ratcheted up their attacks in anticipation of Congressional hearings and a reauthorization process that could get under way soon after the new Congress convenes in January.

Those critics were empowered by a spate of recent studies showing that the nation has made slight overall progress in closing the achievement gap since the law went into effect. (A handful, including New York and New Jersey, are said to have made moderate progress.) The data has been seized upon as evidence that Congress set the bar too high.

Generally, the opponents do not argue that impoverished children can never be educated up to the same standards as the wealthy. They simply say it will take much longer than the law permits. In the world of education reform, where ambitious programs generally last only as long as it takes for the schools to fail to meet the first target, endless deferral of deadlines would be a death knell for No Child Left Behind.

And the country can’t afford that. Unless we improve schools — especially for minority children who will make up the work force of the future — we will fall behind our competitors abroad who are doing a better job of educating the next generation.

It’s impossible to brand No Child Left Behind as a failure, because its agenda has never been carried out. The law was supposed to remake schools that serve poor and minority students by breaking with the age-old practice of staffing those schools with poorly trained and poorly educated teachers. States were supposed to provide students with highly qualified teachers in all core courses by the beginning of the current academic year. That didn’t happen.

The country would be much further down the road toward complying with No Child Left Behind if the Department of Education had given the states clear direction and the technical assistance they needed. Instead, the department simply ignored the provision until recently and allowed states to behave as though the teacher quality problem did not exist. Thanks to this approach, the country must now start from scratch on what is far and away the most crucial provision of the law.

Getting up to speed will not be easy. Most states lack even the most basic systems for overseeing teacher training and the teacher assignment process. Worse still, the practice of dumping poorly qualified teachers into the schools that serve the poorest, neediest children has become second nature in many places.

The battle for teacher quality is just getting under way. The country can either win that battle or watch its fortunes fade as the national work force becomes less and less competitive. Given what’s at stake, the teacher quality provision of No Child Left Behind deserves to be at the very top of the list when Congress revisits the law.

    Why the Achievement Gap Persists, NYT, 8.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/opinion/08fri1.html

Editorial

An Assault on Local School Control

December 4, 2006
The New York Times

More than 50 years after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, the nation still has not abolished de facto segregation in public schools. But thanks to good will and enormous effort, some communities have made progress. Today the Supreme Court hears arguments in a pair of cases that could undo much of that work.

Conservative activists are seeking to halt the completely voluntary, and laudable, efforts by Seattle and Louisville, Ky., to promote racially integrated education. Both cities have school assignment plans known as managed or open choice. Children are assigned to schools based on a variety of factors, one of which is the applicant’s race.

The plan that Jefferson County adopted for Louisville has a goal of having black enrollment in every school be no less than 15 percent and no more than 50 percent. Seattle assigns students to its 10 high schools based on a number of factors, including an “integration tiebreaker.” This tiebreaker, which is applied to students of all races, requires that an applicant’s race be taken into account when a school departs by more than 15 percent from the district’s overall racial breakdown.

Parents in both districts sued, alleging that the consideration of race is unconstitutional. In each case, the court of appeals upheld the assignment plans. In the Seattle case, Judge Alex Kozinski, a Reagan appointee who is highly respected by legal conservatives, wrote that because the district’s plan does not advantage or disadvantage any particular racial group — its pro-integration formula applies equally to all — it “carries none of the baggage the Supreme Court has found objectionable” in other cases involving race-based actions.

The Louisville and Seattle plans are precisely the kind of benign race-based policies that the court has long held to be constitutional. Promoting diversity in education is a compelling state interest under the equal protection clause, and these districts are using carefully considered, narrowly tailored plans to make their schools more diverse.

It is startling to see the Justice Department, which was such a strong advocate for integration in the civil rights era, urging the court to strike down the plans. Its position is at odds with so much the Bush administration claims to believe. The federal government is asking federal courts to use the Constitution to overturn educational decisions made by localities. Conservative activists should be crying “judicial activism,” but they do not seem to mind this activism with an anti-integration agenda.

If these plans are struck down, many other cities’ plans will most likely also have to be dismantled. In Brown, a unanimous court declared education critical for a child to “succeed in life” and held that equal protection does not permit it to be provided on a segregated basis. It would be tragic if the court changed directions now and began using equal protection to re-segregate the schools.

    An Assault on Local School Control, NYT, 4.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/opinion/04mon1.html

32 U.S. Students Named Rhodes Scholars

November 19, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:18 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Thirty-two men and women from across the United States have been selected as Rhodes Scholars for 2007, the scholarship trust announced Sunday.

The scholars were selected from 896 applicants endorsed by 340 colleges and universities. The scholarships, the oldest of the international study awards available to American students, provide two or three years of study. The students will enter Oxford University in England next October.

This year's winners include Brian Johnsrud of Bozeman, Mont. Johnsrud graduated from Montana State University in 2006 with a major in English and currently teaches at a charter school.

Johnsrud, who has served as a mentor, tutor and debate coach, is an avid outdoorsman and distance runner. He plans to study medieval literature at Oxford.

Rhodes Scholarships were created in 1902 by the will of British philanthropist Cecil Rhodes. Winners are selected on the basis of high academic achievement, personal integrity, leadership potential and physical vigor, among other attributes.

The American students will join an international group of scholars selected from 13 other jurisdictions around the world. Approximately 85 scholars are selected each year.

The value of the Rhodes Scholarship varies depending on the field of study. The total value averages about $45,000 per year.

With the elections announced Sunday, 3,110 Americans have won Rhodes Scholarships, representing 307 colleges and universities.

    32 U.S. Students Named Rhodes Scholars, NYT, 19.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Rhodes-Scholars.html

Taser Incident at UCLA Under Review

November 18, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:43 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- An attorney who was part of a review of excessive force complaints following the Rodney King beating will investigate a UCLA police officer's use of a Taser on an Iranian-American student, the school said Friday.

The move came in response to student demands voiced earlier Friday at a news conference and subsequent rally, where speakers said the shocking of Mostafa Tabatabainejad, 23, sent a chill across the campus.

''As students we feel our safety is endangered, and we do not feel safe on campus,'' said Sabiha Ameen, president of the Muslim Students Association.

Tabatabainejad, 23, was shocked Tuesday night after arguing with a campus police officer who was conducting a routine check of student IDs at the University of California, Los Angeles, Powell Library computer lab.

Campus police say he refused to show his student ID and refused to leave the building when asked.

A few hours after the rally, acting Chancellor Norman Abrams announced he had chosen Merrick Bobb, the founder of a local nonprofit dedicated to police reform, to lead an independent investigation.

Bobb served as staff attorney for the Christopher Commission, which was formed to examine allegations of excessive force in the Los Angeles Police Department after the King beating in the early '90s.

''I have complete respect for, and confidence in, (campus police),'' Abrams said. ''But there are times when it is helpful to turn to an outside review as well.''

University Police Chief Karl Ross said he had recommended the independent probe.

''While I am confident of our ability to perform a fair and thorough investigation, I am also cognizant of the need for a transparent review,'' Ross said.

Police said they shocked Tabatabainejad after he urged others to join his resistance and a crowd began to gather. Footage from another student's camera phone showed Tabatabainejad screaming on the floor of the computer lab.

Students at the news conference said there was no sign Tabatabainejad was targeted because of his ethnicity. But his lawyer disagreed.

Civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman announced separately that he plans to file a lawsuit charging that the American-born Tabatabainejad was singled out because of his Middle Eastern appearance.

Abrams cautioned the public against jumping to conclusions before an investigation is completed.

''It would be best if everyone, within and without the university, would withhold judgment pending review of the matter,'' Abrams said in an earlier news release.

    Taser Incident at UCLA Under Review, NYT, 18.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Student-Stunned.html

Most Students in Big Cities Lag Badly in Basic Science

November 16, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 — A least half of eighth graders tested in science failed to demonstrate even a basic understanding of the subject in 9 of 10 major cities, and fourth graders, the only other group tested, fared little better, according to results released here Wednesday.

The outcome of those tests, part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation’s report card, showed that student performance in urban public schools was not only poor but also far short of science scores in the nation as a whole.

Half or a little more of the eighth-grade students in Charlotte, San Diego and Boston lacked a basic grasp of science.

In six of the other cities — New York, Houston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles and Atlanta — the share of eighth graders without that knowledge was even higher, ranging from about three-fifths in New York to about four-fifths in Atlanta. By comparison, the corresponding share for the nation as a whole was 43 percent.

Among the 10 cities, only in Austin were the eighth graders who lacked a basic understanding in the minority, and just barely there.

“It’s a national disgrace,” said Rodger W. Bybee, director of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, which develops and evaluates science curriculums and promotes the teaching of science. “We as a nation should be able to do better than that.”

At the fourth-grade level, a majority of students in all the 10 cities except Austin, Charlotte and San Diego failed to demonstrate basic understanding in science, compared with 34 percent nationwide. According to a report accompanying the scores, this meant they lacked the skills and reasoning needed to learn science, and could not read simple charts or follow elementary experiments. A similar definition, though with expectations of a higher level of skill, applied to eighth graders.

Students in New York were on a par with those in other large cities, though white students there scored lower than whites in other cities and in the nation. The scores of blacks and Latinos in New York were not significantly different from those of similar students in the other cities.

New York’s schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, pointed out in a statement that low-income students there had done better than those in most other cities, but added, “We, like the rest of the country, have a lot more work to do in this critical area” of teaching science to the poor.

He noted that beginning with the next academic year, the city would begin testing students annually in science in Grades 3 to 8. Another innovation for the 2007-8 school year is that under the No Child Left Behind Act, public schools across the country must begin testing students in science at least once from Grades 3 to 8. But the results of these tests, like those of New York’s, will not determine whether schools have made sufficient progress under the law, which counts only reading and math to determine a school’s standing.

While states use a hodgepodge of tests to measure student achievement, the national assessment is the only exam given to students nationwide. The science test — in earth, physical and life sciences — was given in early 2005 to 280,000 students, including an extra 30,000 at public schools in the 10 cities, which had volunteered so that they could get a comparative snapshot of performance. The scores were grouped in four categories, from below basic to advanced.

The results prompted the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents the nation’s largest school districts, to call for national standards in science, and in reading and math as well.

Michael Casserly, the group’s executive director, acknowledged that political resistance to national standards was strong in a nation that generally considers education a prerogative of localities. But Mr. Casserly said such standards would lend clarity to efforts to improve achievement.

The fourth-grade national assessment, he said, tests students in subjects like electrical circuitry, the difference between plant and animal cells, and the formation of rocks. “But some state standards,” he continued, “don’t teach them until the fifth grade. It is not clear, then, what our teachers are supposed to teach when.”

Gerald Wheeler, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, who wrote some of the questions asked on the national assessment, said he found the test results “extremely disappointing.”

“There’s no way these kids are going to be able to survive in our technological society,” Dr. Wheeler said.

With the exception of fourth graders in Austin, low-income students in urban schools performed significantly below the average for low-income students nationwide. “Student poverty, parent education, home resources, English-language proficiency and other factors outside our control work in tandem like a perfect storm to dampen our results in ways that few others have to contend with,” Mr. Casserly said.

But the results suggested that performance was influenced more by the disparities associated with race and income than by whether students attended school in cities or in other settings, said Darvin M. Winick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the test.

For example, while Atlanta was below the median in the ranking of urban performance, its white fourth graders not only did better on the exam than did 86 percent of fourth graders across the country but also outperformed the nation’s white fourth graders as a whole, who reached only the 62nd percentile. At the same time, the city’s black fourth graders were in the bottom 22 percent of fourth graders nationwide — two points below the national average for blacks.

Only in Austin, Houston and Charlotte did black and Latino fourth graders score higher than similar students in the nation as a whole. Still, their scores were in the bottom 25 percent to 32 percent of all students taking the exam.

    Most Students in Big Cities Lag Badly in Basic Science, NYT, 16.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/16/education/16reportcard.html

As Math Scores Lag, a New Push for the Basics

November 14, 2006
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

SEATTLE — For the second time in a generation, education officials are rethinking the teaching of math in American schools.

The changes are being driven by students’ lagging performance on international tests and mathematicians’ warnings that more than a decade of so-called reform math — critics call it fuzzy math — has crippled students with its de-emphasizing of basic drills and memorization in favor of allowing children to find their own ways to solve problems.

At the same time, parental unease has prompted ever more families to pay for tutoring, even for young children. Shalimar Backman, who put pressure on officials here by starting a parents group called Where’s the Math?, remembers the moment she became concerned.

“When my oldest child, an A-plus stellar student, was in sixth grade, I realized he had no idea, no idea at all, how to do long division,” Ms. Backman said, “so I went to school and talked to the teacher, who said, ‘We don’t teach long division; it stifles their creativity.’ ”

Across the nation, the reconsideration of what should be taught and how has been accelerated by a report in September by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the nation’s leading group of math teachers.

It was a report from this same group in 1989 that influenced a generation of teachers to let children explore their own solutions to problems, write and draw pictures about math, and use tools like the calculator at the same time they learn algorithms.

But this fall, the group changed course, recommending a tighter focus on basic math skills and an end to “mile wide, inch deep” state standards that force schools to teach dozens of math topics in each grade. In fourth grade, for example, the report recommends that the curriculum should center on the “quick recall” of multiplication and division, the area of two-dimensional shapes and an understanding of decimals.

The Bush administration, too, has created a panel to study research on teaching math. It is expected to issue recommendations early next year.

Here in Washington, Gov. Chris Gregoire has asked the State Board of Education to develop new math standards by the end of next year to bring teaching in line with international competition, and a year later to choose no more than three curriculums to replace the dozens of teaching methods now in use. Ms. Gregoire, a Democrat, also wants new math requirements for high school graduation.

In Utah and Florida, too, state education officials are re-examining their math standards and curriculum.

Grass-roots groups in many cities are agitating for a return to basics. Many point to California’s standards as a good model: the state adopted reform math in the early 1990s but largely rejected it near the end of the decade, a turnaround that led to rising math achievement.

“The Seattle level of concern about math may be unusual, but there’s now an enormous amount of discomfort about fuzzy math on the East Coast, in Maine, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and now New Jersey is starting to make noise,” said R. James Milgram, a math professor at Stanford University. “There’s increasing understanding that the math situation in the United States is a complete disaster.”

Schools in New York City use a reform math curriculum, Everyday Mathematics, but some parents there, too, would like to see that changed, a step they are advocating through NYC HOLD, a group of parents and teachers that has a Web site with links to information on math battles nationwide.

A spokesman for the New York City Department of Education said that Everyday Mathematics covered both reform and traditional approaches, emphasizing knowledge of basic algorithms along with conceptual understanding. He added that research gathered recently by the federal Department of Education had found the program to be one of the few in the country for which there was evidence of positive effects on student math achievement.

The frenzy has been prompted in part by the growing awareness that, at a time of increasing globalization, the math skills of children in the United States simply do not measure up: American eighth-graders lag far behind those from Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, an international test.

Parental discontent here in Washington State intensified after the announcement in September that only 51 percent of 10th graders passed the math part of state assessment tests, far fewer than showed proficiency in reading or writing.

“Math is on absolutely everybody’s radar in the state right now,” said Ms. Backman, whose Where’s the Math? group drew hundreds of parents and math teachers last month to a forum on K-12 math.

Many parents and teachers remain committed to the goals of reform math, having children understand what they are doing rather than simply memorizing and parroting answers. Traditional math instruction did not work for most students, say reform math proponents like Virginia Warfield, a professor at the University of Washington.

“It produces people who hate math, who can’t connect the math they are doing with anything in their lives,” Dr. Warfield said. “That’s why we have so many parents who see their children having trouble with math and say ‘Honey, don’t worry. I never could do math either.’ ”

“In Asian cultures,” she added, “the assumption is that everyone learns mathematics, and of course, parents will help with mathematics.”

But even many of those who admire the goals of reform math want their children to have more drills.

“My mother is a high school math tutor, and her joke is that this math is what’s kept her in business,” said Marcy Berejka, who each week brings Ben, 8, and Dana, 6, to Kumon, a tutoring center based in Japan that has more than a dozen franchises in the Seattle area. “There’s a lot that’s good in the new curriculum, but if you don’t memorize the basic math facts, it gets harder as math gets more complicated.”

The state’s superintendent of public instruction, Terry Bergeson, a supporter of reform math, said in an interview: “I came through the reading wars years ago, and now we’re right in the middle of that with mathematics. It comes back to balance. Of course you need to know your math facts, but you also have to understand what you’re doing. The whole country has been in denial about mathematics, and now we’re sort of at a second Sputnik moment.”

In part, the math wars have grown out of a struggle between professional mathematicians, who say too many American students never master basic math skills, and math educators, who say children who construct their own problem-solving strategies retain their math skills better than those who just memorize the algorithm that produces the correct answer.

After Dr. Milgram of Stanford appeared at a Where’s the Math? meeting, Dr. Warfield, an expert on teaching math educators, wrote in a newsletter that when Dr. Milgram told parents to fight for change, it was “implicit in the instructions that mathematicians who do not agree are classified as mathematics educators (a rung or two below the night custodian).”

The battle here has left many parents frustrated, confused and not sure if they should trust their children’s schools to give them the skills they need. Many have already voted with their feet, enrolling their children in math tutoring.

State Representative Glenn Anderson, a Republican member of the House education committee who has fought for a more rigorous curriculum, said state data showed that Washington residents spent $149 million on tutoring and other education support services in 2004, more than three times the $44 million they spent 10 years earlier.

Kumon, which has a global clientele of more than four million children in 43 countries, focuses on drilling children on basics. Students work their way through hundreds of assignments that move in incremental steps from tracing numerals all the way through differential calculus.

Every week for five years, Tove Burrows has brought her son, Petter, 13, to the Kumon Center in Mercer Island to turn in the worksheets he has done at home, sit down to new drills and pick up a set of assignments for the week ahead.

“If the math curriculum in the schools were different, I would not be doing Kumon,” said Ms. Burrows, whose son is an A student at Islander Middle School. “But I want to make sure he’s mastered the basics, and in school they don’t spend enough time on basics to get that mastery.”

On Mercer Island, an affluent suburb of Seattle that had the state’s best scores on the 10th-grade test, the pendulum has begun to swing toward emphasizing computational skills, especially in high school.

“We’re looking at texts that have more numbers and less language,” said Lisa Eggers, president of the Mercer Island School Board, who at one point sent two of her three children to Kumon. “And we’re one of the few districts where the math scores are going up.”

Even so, seeking outside math help is common in the district, with almost 100 students leaving the high school for math and going instead to nearby private academies for one-on-one tutoring, for which the school give will give them credit.

John Harrison, principal of Mercer Island High School, estimates that as many as 10 percent of his school’s 1,400 students are getting outside math help. “It’s not surprising that math is so important in Seattle, with so many people earning their living at Microsoft or Boeing,” Mr. Harrison said. “Our kids do very well on the state tests, compared to the state averages, but even here, math proficiency is less than reading and writing.”

    As Math Scores Lag, a New Push for the Basics, NYT, 16.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/education/14math.html?em&ex=1163826000&en=c6e1e2cc54723a10&ei=5087%0A

Some opt out of military options

Updated 11/2/2006 11:42 PM ET
USA Today
By Judy Keen

LINCOLNSHIRE, Ill. — Brian Berman, a senior at Stevenson High School, doesn't want to join the military, doesn't want calls from recruiters, doesn't want them at his door.

So his parents signed a form that prevents the school from giving his contact information to recruiters. A provision of the No Child Left Behind law requires high schools to share students' names, phone numbers and addresses with military recruiters unless students or their parents choose to opt out.

Recruiters still come to school, he says, and "try to act all friendly." Berman, 18, doesn't buy their pitches about career and educational opportunities. "It's ridiculous," he says. "They're trying to bribe you to enlist."

Pentagon officials say recruiters just want the same information that goes to colleges and companies to make career pitches to students.

If Berman's parents had not signed the form, the school would be required to share his contact information with military recruiters under the 2001 law.

More than half of the nearly 4,500 students at Stevenson in this north Chicago suburb have submitted the forms. Schools that don't comply risk losing federal funds. None have so far.

Spreading the word

The Pentagon and the Education Department don't track how many students ask not to be contacted by military recruiters. Opponents of the practice are spreading the word that parents must take action if they object:

•A conference called "Education Not Militarization!" will be held Saturday in Los Angeles. Arlene Inouye, a high-school teacher and founder of the Coalition Against Militarism in Our Schools, says the group has members in 50 schools who make sure parents and students know their rights.

Lupe Lujan of San Gabriel, Calif., got involved in the group after her son Samuel, then 17, showed up at home a couple years ago with a military recruiter to get Samuel's Social Security card, needed to take a military aptitude test. "I was very happy to tell the recruiter, 'You're not taking my son,' " Lujan says.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill this fall that would have required schools to include an opt-out box to check on student emergency-contact cards. Some schools mail notices about opting out to parents, others send them home with students.

•Parents and peace activists in Montgomery County, Md., distributed opt-out forms to parents at back-to-school nights this fall.

•In Duluth, Minn., the Parent Teacher Student Association Council persuaded high schools to push back the deadline to turn in the forms from Oct. 1 to Nov. 1 and stepped up efforts to make parents aware of the requirement.

•The National PTA supports changing the federal law so recruiters could not approach students unless their parents "opt in" and request such contact.

Marine Maj. Stewart Upton, a Pentagon spokesman, says the law doesn't give the military an edge over other institutions interested in giving students career choices. It requires schools to "provide military recruiters the same access that's provided to colleges and other prospective employers," he says.

Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox in Kentucky, says recruiters want to work with the schools. "The idea is to have a strong personal and professional relationship with your schools," he says.

Students who submit the opt-out forms, Smith says, aren't necessarily precluding all contact. "It means that the school isn't going to give us that student contact information," he says. "It doesn't mean the recruiter might not contact the student anyway."

Recruiters can get students' names from other sources, such as career days at schools. If a student calls a military branch's toll-free number, responds to a letter or asks for information online, recruiters can make contact, Smith says.

Juniors and seniors are the focus of recruiters from all military branches. At Stevenson, recruiters organize exercise competitions and give prizes such as key chains and T-shirts.

That doesn't bother Kris Ozga, 17, a senior. His parents didn't sign the opt-out form, and he gets calls from recruiters, even on his cellphone. "They're like, 'Oh, have you even thought about enlisting?' " he says. He did think about it, but he's pursuing a college baseball scholarship.

He didn't like some recruiters' style. "Sometimes they don't back off," he says.

Kareem Miller, 17, didn't opt out and sometimes gets three or four calls a month. "It doesn't really bother anybody," he says. "It might make people worry, though, if there's a draft."

Students recruited for years

Recruiting high-school students isn't new. Pam Polakow, whose son attended Stevenson before the law took effect in 2002, says military recruiters were "extremely persistent" when he was in school, calling at least once a week. "I was very uncomfortable," she says.

Daniel Mater, 17, a Stevenson senior, says his parents signed the form. "They made the decision, but I never had any interest in the military," he says. "It saves me time."

Senior Gino Ciarroni, 18, has been talking to recruiters from the Army, Marines and Navy. "I'm interested in serving my country," he says, "and getting help with college." He's had trouble, though, getting answers about what military job he would qualify for and how much money he'd get for college.

Recruiters gave him their cellphone numbers and seem to be "there to help," he says. He's considering joining the Reserve Officers' Training Corps.

Senior Robert Warren, 17, doesn't mind the calls. "They're very respectful," he says. "When I told them I'm not interested, they stopped calling."

    Some opt out of military options, UT, 2.11.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-11-02-recruits_x.htm

Change in Federal Rules Backs Single-Sex Public Education

October 25, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASHINGTON, Oct. 24— The Bush administration is giving public school districts broad new latitude to expand the number of single-sex classes, and even schools, in what is widely considered the most significant policy change on the issue since a landmark federal law barring sex discrimination in education more than 30 years ago.

Two years in the making, the new rules, announced Tuesday by the Education Department, will allow districts to create single-sex schools and classes as long as enrollment is voluntary. School districts that go that route must also make coeducational schools and classes of “substantially equal” quality available for members of the excluded sex.

The federal action is likely to accelerate efforts by public school systems to experiment with single-sex education, particularly among charter schools. Across the nation, the number of public schools exclusively for boys or girls has risen from 3 in 1995 to 241 today, said Leonard Sax, executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Schools. That is a tiny fraction of the approximately 93,000 public schools across the country.

“You’re going to see a proliferation of these,” said Paul Vallas, chief of schools in Philadelphia, where there are four single-sex schools and plans to open two more. “There’s a lot of support for this type of school model in Philadelphia.”

Until now, Mr. Vallas said, there had been a threat of legal challenge that had delayed, for example, a boys charter school from opening in Philadelphia this September. New York City has nine single-sex public schools, most of which opened in the past four years.

While the move was sought by some conservatives and urban educators, and had backing from both sides of the political aisle, a number of civil rights and women’s rights groups condemned the change.

“It really is a serious green light from the Department of Education to re-instituting official discrimination in schools around the country,” said Marcia Greenberger, a co-president of the National Women’s Law Center.

Under Title IX, the 1972 law that banned sex discrimination in educational institutions that receive federal funds, single-sex classes and extracurricular activities are largely limited to physical education classes that include contact sports and to sex education.

To open schools exclusively for boys or girls, a district has until now had to show a “compelling reason,” for example, that it was acting to remedy past discrimination.

But a new attitude began to take hold with the passage of the No Child Left Behind law in 2002 when women senators from both parties came out in support of same-sex education and asked the Education Department to draft guidelines to permit their growth.

The new rules, first proposed by the Education Department in 2004, are designed to bring Title IX into conformity with a section of the No Child Left Behind law that called on the department to promote single-sex schools.

The interest in separating boys from girls in the classroom is part of a movement to allow more experimentation in public schools.

Although the research is mixed, some studies suggest low-income children in urban schools learn better when separated from the opposite sex. Concerns about boys’ performance in secondary education has also driven some of the interest same-sex education.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings described the changes as part of a greater effort to expand educational options in the public sector. “Every child should receive a high quality education in America, and every school district deserves the tools to provide it,” Ms. Spellings said.

She said that research supported offering single-sex education, and that the changes would not water down the protections of Title IX.

But Stephanie Monroe, who heads the Education Department’s office of civil rights, acknowledged the equivocal nature of the department’s own research on the issue.

“Educational research, though it’s ongoing and shows some mixed results, does suggest that single-sex education can provide some benefits to some students, under certain circumstances,” she said.

Although the changes announced Tuesday will not officially take effect until Nov. 24, school districts, including in New York City, had anticipated the new rules and some opened single-sex schools on the presumption of today’s changes.

Kelly Devers, a spokeswoman for the New York City schools, said the system’s lawyers planned to examine the rules to see how they expanded options for principals. Until now, public school districts that offered a school to one sex generally had to provide a comparable school for students of the other sex. The new rules, however, say districts can simply offer such students the option to attend comparable coeducational schools.

Critics argue that the changes contradicted the intent of Title IX and would not withstand a legal challenge — a point Education Department officials disputed.

Nancy Zirkin, vice president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, an umbrella organization representing about 200 civil rights groups, said the new regulations “violate both Title IX and the equal protection clause of the Constitution.”

“Segregation is totally unacceptable in the context of race,” she said. “Why in the world in the context of gender would it be acceptable?”

The American Civil Liberties Union signaled it might consider going to court. “We are certainly in many states looking at schools that are segregating students by sex and considering whether any of them are ripe for a challenge,” said Emily Martin, deputy director of the Women’s Rights Project at the A.C.L.U..

Tom Carroll, chairman and founder of the Brighter Choice Charter School for Boys and the Brighter Choice Charter School for Girls in Albany, said the new regulations gave greater legal protections to single-sex schools that had, until now, operated under the threat of lawsuits by such groups. “The A.C.L.U. now has a dramatically steeper hill to climb to upset the apple cart on single-sex schools,” Mr. Carroll said.

He said his schools’ research showed boys were stronger in math and girls were stronger in literacy. But in recently released test scores, he said, his schools did better than any other public schools in Albany. “Paradoxically, by educating them separately,” he said, “we were able to do much to reverse the gender gaps that typically leave girls behind in math and boys behind in literacy.”

    Change in Federal Rules Backs Single-Sex Public Education, NYT, 25.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/education/25gender.html?hp&ex=1161835200&en=d6803175235f7232&ei=5094&partner=homepage

College tuition and fees up more than 6% at four-year public schools

Updated 10/24/2006 11:07 AM ET
The Associated Press
By Justin Pope
USA Today

College price increases slowed this year but they again topped inflation, and financial aid isn't keeping pace, a new report says.

Tuition and fees at public four-year public colleges rose $344, or 6.3%, to an average of $5,836 for the 2006-07 academic year, according to the College Board's annual "Trends in College Pricing" report, released Tuesday.

Accounting for inflation, prices rose just 2.4% — the lowest rise in six years, and the third straight time the gap between prices and overall inflation has narrowed.

Tuition and fees at private four-year colleges rose 5.9% overall, to $22,218.

The news that price hikes are getting smaller is tempered by the fact that this decade has been a period of an extraordinary increases in college costs. Published prices are up 35% in five years — the largest increase of any five-year period in the 30 years covered the report.

That's coupled with the reality that grant aid — from the government, colleges and private sources — isn't covering the price hikes. For the 62% of full-time undergraduates who receive grant aid, the average net cost of a four-year public school rose 8% to $2,700, the report said.

"There is some good news: There's a lot of aid out there that is helping students," said Sandy Baum, senior policy analyst at the College Board. "But there are real notes of caution about ... the failure of grant aid to keep up with the rise in prices."

The best news came for people at the nation's public two-year colleges, which educate nearly half of American college students. There, tuition and fees rose just 4.1% to $2,272. The increase was limited by California, which is home to more than a fifth of the nation's two-year public college students and lowered tuition and fees 12% this year. Elsewhere, prices rose 5.1%.

Accounting for financial aid, however, the average net cost nationally for two-year public college students declined, and is less than $100.

"We're seeing more students who would generally have gone to the state university coming to the community college because of the issue of pricing," said Wilfredo Nieves, president of Middlesex Community College in Connecticut, who spoke at the announcement.

At four-year public schools, adding room and board to tuition and fees makes the college prices average $12,796. At private colleges, the price is $30,367.

The cost increases at state schools are baffling to many students and parents, given the relative health of the economy and state finances.

After several years of sharp cuts, state spending on higher education has been rising again nationally. The problem is that more people are enrolling, so there is less and less to spend per student.

    College tuition and fees up more than 6% at four-year public schools, UT, 24.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/college/2006-10-24-college-costs_x.htm

No Test Tubes? Debate on Virtual Science Classes

October 20, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

When the Internet was just beginning to shake up American education, a chemistry professor photographed thousands of test tubes holding molecular solutions and, working with video game designers, created a simulated laboratory that allowed students to mix chemicals in virtual beakers and watch the reactions.

In the years since, that virtual chemistry laboratory — as well as other simulations allowing students to dissect virtual animals or to peer into tidal pools in search of virtual anemone — has become a widely used science teaching tool. The virtual chemistry laboratory alone has some 150,000 students seated at computer terminals around the country to try experiments that would be too costly or dangerous to do at their local high schools. “Some kids figure out how to blow things up in half an hour,” said the professor, Brian F. Woodfield of Brigham Young University.

Now, however, a dispute with potentially far-reaching consequences has flared over how far the Internet can go in displacing the brick-and-mortar laboratory.Prompted by skeptical university professors, the College Board, one of the most powerful organizations in American education, is questioning whether Internet-based laboratories are an acceptable substitute for the hands-on culturing of gels and peering through microscopes that have long been essential ingredients of American laboratory science.

As part of a broader audit of the thousands of high school courses that display its Advanced Placement trademark, the board has recruited panels of university professors and experts in Internet-based learning to scrutinize the quality of online laboratories used in Web-based A.P. science courses.

“Professors are saying that simulations can be really good, that they use them to supplement their own lab work, but that they’d be concerned about giving credit to students who have never had any experience in a hands-on lab,” said Trevor Packer, the board’s executive director for Advanced Placement. “You could have students going straight into second-year college science courses without ever having used a Bunsen burner.”

Internet-based educators are seeking to convince the board, and the public, that their virtual laboratories are educationally sound, pointing out that their students earn high scores on the A.P. exams. They also say online laboratories are often the only way advanced science can be taught in isolated rural schools or impoverished urban ones. Online schooling, which was all but nonexistent at the elementary and secondary level a decade ago, is today one of the fastest-growing educational sectors, with some half-million course enrollments nationwide.

Twenty-five states operate public, Internet-based schools like the Florida Virtual School, the nation’s largest, which has some 40,000 students. Virtual High School, a nonprofit school based in Maynard, Mass., has 7,600 students from 30 states and many countries. Susan Patrick, a former Department of Education official who is president of the North American Council for Online Learning, estimated that 60,000 public school students were enrolled in some online science course.

John Watson, an education consultant who wrote a report last year documenting virtual education’s growth, said online schools had faced lawsuits over financing and resistance by local school boards but nothing as daunting as the College Board.

“This challenge threatens the advance of online education at the national level in a way that I don’t think there are precedents for,” Mr. Watson said.

The board signaled a tough position this year.

“Members of the College Board insist that college-level laboratory science courses not be labeled ‘A.P.’ without a physical lab,” the board said in a letter sent to online schools in April. “Online science courses can only be labeled ‘A.P.’ if the online provider” can ensure “that students have a guided, hands-on (not virtual) laboratory experience.”

But after an outcry by online schools, the board issued an apology in June, acknowledging that “there may be new developments” in online learning that could merit its endorsement.

Mr. Packer of the College Board said in an interview that the board had set up three five-member panels composed of biology, chemistry and physics professors and online educators, which are to meet in New York next month to review the online laboratories offered by Internet-based schools for A.P. courses.

The board’s rulings will determine whether high schools can apply the A.P. designation to online science courses starting next fall on the transcripts of students applying to colleges, Mr. Packer said.

In recent conversations with college science professors, the board has encountered considerable skepticism that virtual laboratories can replace hands-on experience, he said.

But educators at several prominent online schools pointed to their students’ high scores on A.P. exams.

On the 2005 administration of the A.P. biology exam, for instance, 61 percent of students nationwide earned a qualifying score of three or above on the A.P.’s five-point system. Yet 71 percent of students who took A.P. biology online through the Florida Virtual School, and 80 percent of students who took it from the Virtual High School, earned a three or higher on that test.

“The proof is in the pudding,” said Pam Birtolo, chief learning officer at the Florida Virtual School.

Still, there is tremendous variety. A 2005 guidebook, “Finding an Online High School,” compiled by Vincent Kiernan, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, lists 113 Internet-based secondary schools, 32 of which offered at least one A.P. science course. Online curricula are anything but standardized, and new approaches to online laboratories are emerging at a dizzying pace, said Kemi Jona, a computer science professor at Northwestern University.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all landscape,” Dr. Jona said.

The science courses offered by some online high schools draw on multiple Internet sites that provide data, then lead students through an analysis. At one site, for instance, operated by the University of Arizona, students collect data from the cells of an onion root and use it to calculate the duration of each phase in the cells’ division.

Chemistry and other science courses at many Internet-based high schools include laboratories often characterized as “kitchen science,” in which students use household materials — ice, cooking oil, glass jars — to carry out experiments.

“ ‘Make sure we have potatoes in the house,’ my daughter told me before her last lab,” in which students studied osmosis, said Mayuri Shah, whose daughter Sonia is taking A.P. biology from the Florida Virtual School. Sonia, 16, enrolled in the online course because her high school in Lecanto, Fla., north of Tampa, does not offer it.

That is one of the most common reasons students sign up for online classes, said Ms. Patrick, the North American Council for Online Learning president.

“Thousands of schools in rural areas don’t have science labs, but they have kids who want to go to college and need that science inquiry experience,” she said. “Virtual science labs are their only option.”

ConVal High School in Peterborough, N.H., offers more than a dozen science courses, but zoology is not among them. So Katherine Lantz, a junior, is studying it online.

One recent evening she was at home, moving through a virtual pig dissection screen by screen. One image showed a pig kidney, outlined by pulsing yellow dots.

“Whoa, that’s kind of gross!” Katherine said. She clicked her mouse, causing a virtual scalpel to lay the pig’s kidney open, its internal regions highlighted by blinking labels.

“Its nice to have it enlarged because if we were dissecting this in my school lab this would be hard to see,” Katherine said. “I learn a lot online — as much as I would attending a physical class.”

But Earl W. Fleck, the biology professor who created the virtual pig dissection, believes otherwise. Dr. Fleck began working on the virtual dissection in 1997 to help his students at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., review for tests and to offer a substitute for those who, for ethical reasons, objected to working with once-living specimens.

Dr. Fleck, who is now provost at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, said students worldwide found the virtual dissection useful. But he called it “markedly inferior” to performing a real dissection.

“You don’t get the look and the feel and the smell,” he said.

    No Test Tubes? Debate on Virtual Science Classes, NYT, 20.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/20/education/20online.html?hp&ex=1161403200&en=3e39d8a8d225b0dc&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A Very Violent School, or Just Very Honest?

October 8, 2006
The New York Times
By WINNIE HU

ROME, N.Y. — The students at Rome Free Academy here in upstate New York do not pass through metal detectors. They are not escorted to class by police officers. And their graffiti-free lockers are not routinely searched for drugs.

But last month, the State Education Department placed Rome on its first “watch list” of dangerous schools, a Top 10 of schools that have repeatedly reported student violence like weapons possession, assaults and arson.

Rome Free Academy, a public high school 45 miles east of Syracuse, stands out on a list dominated by urban schools not just because it is nestled on a high-tech campus on a former Air Force base, but also because the teachers, parents and students here contend that it does not belong on the list.

While no one denies that the school has its share of lunchroom fights, the parents say Rome was unfairly singled out after reporting every single case, as the law requires, while other schools did not.

“Maybe they’ve been too honest,” said Gary DeMatteo, chief of police in this city of 35,000, and the husband of a math teacher at the high school. “It just doesn’t make sense any other way.”

Few things regarding schools — other than perhaps test scores — are parsed as closely as violence statistics or can provoke as much criticism, dismay and even recrimination within a community. After the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, parents and elected officials nationwide sought to hold schools accountable for the safety of their students with a raft of antiviolence laws that called for better record-keeping, among other things.

(In response to deadly attacks in three schools in three states recently, the White House is convening a conference on school safety Tuesday.)

But many of these laws have been inconsistently enforced, leading to what appear to be lopsided records. In a national list of schools identified last year as “persistently dangerous,” the most serious category of violent schools, Pennsylvania accounted for one-quarter of the total, and New York and New Jersey combined to account for another quarter, while a majority of states reported none at all.

Even so, an audit by the New York State comptroller, Alan G. Hevesi, in May found that high schools were significantly underreporting school violence.

James Garbarino, a psychology professor at Loyola University in Chicago, is one of many school violence experts skeptical about watch lists that are based on self-reporting, which essentially amounts to an honor system.

“Lots of schools don’t want to report because it brings unwanted negative attention,” Mr. Garbarino said. “It affects the careers of school administrators and school boards, and it can even affect real estate values. So there’s a lot more at work here than just acts of violence.”

In Rome, the state watch list made front-page headlines in the local newspaper and brought sharp disavowals from school officials, who have invited parents and members of civic groups to visit Rome Free Academy to see for themselves.

It has also dismayed longtime residents like Kathy Kusch, 45, who moved here a decade ago so her two daughters could attend Rome schools. “I don’t particularly like the fights,” she said. “But I don’t like more the reputation we’re getting because it makes it sound like we’re not a good place to live.”

Under federal and state laws, school administrators have been required since 2001 to report all acts of violence and disruptive conduct during school activities and on school grounds.

State education officials then review two years of the reports and use a weighted system to identify troubled schools as “persistently dangerous,” a designation that eases the path for parents to transfer their children to another school. Beginning this year, schools that fall just short of that designation are put on a watch list.

State education officials last month cited a total of 27 violent schools for the current school year, 17 of them “persistently dangerous,” the other 10 on the watch list.

All but 7 of the 27 are in New York City. Two are in Rochester, and one is in Buffalo. Besides Rome Free Academy, the others are two programs for troubled young people, the Berkshire Junior-Senior High School in Columbia County and the Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Westchester County; and the Milton L. Olive Middle School in Wyandanch, on Long Island.

The number of schools highlighted is far higher than in any previous year, but is less than 1 percent of the 4,453 public schools in New York State.

In the United States and Puerto Rico, there were 36 schools listed as “persistently dangerous” last year, down from 47 in 2003; this year’s national statistics have not yet been released. Of the 36, Pennsylvania had the most, with 9, while Puerto Rico had 8 and Maryland 6. Five were in New York, four in New Jersey, and none in Connecticut.

All the schools on the list reported a number of violent episodes over the last two school years, ranging from 11 to 104 in each year. Rome Free Academy, which has 1,819 students in grades 9 through 12, reported 53 violent episodes last school year, 8 fewer than the school year before.

School records show that five of those episodes were confiscations of weapons: a switchblade and four penknives. The remaining 48 cases were fights, 2 leading to serious injury. In the first such instance, a student received medical treatment after a fight on a school bus. In the second, a student became upset in class and threw a textbook over his shoulder, striking the teacher.

“I would even dare say that was accidental,” said Mark Benson, the school’s principal. “But by the way I understand the reporting, we are required to report it.”

Complaints about inconsistent reporting have increasingly drawn the attention of state officials. Mr. Hevesi’s audit criticized the State Education Department’s handling of school violence reporting, finding that 10 of 17 high schools — Rome was not in the sample — failed to report at least one-third of their violent and disruptive events.

For example, the audit cited 780 unreported cases at Albany High School, including 106 assaults that resulted in physical injury. The school, which is not on the state’s watch list, tightened security last week after a student was stabbed. School officials, however, dispute the assertion they have failed to report violent cases.

School officials across the state say the reporting process is overly subjective and confusing. First, they must decide whether a confrontation is serious enough to report, and then they must choose among vaguely defined categories. For instance, if a student is scratched in a fight, should that be reported as an “assault with physical injury” or as a “minor altercation”? Or should it be reported at all?

Take, for example, Mount Vernon High School in Westchester County, which has 2,600 students. Officials there did not report a single assault resulting in a physical injury for the 2004-5 school year; Rome Free Academy reported 54. “I think that Rome probably overreported,” said Ellen Garcia, who reviews school violence reporting for the Mount Vernon City School District. “And there’s a chance Mount Vernon underreported.”

To address such discrepancies, state officials have visited 25 schools since June to review records, and plan another 75 visits by June 2007. They held training sessions for 1,500 superintendents, principals and school workers in August, and have requested more money to hire 70 auditors and other staff to monitor school violence reports.

Asked about Rome, Greg Bayduss, the state official who oversees school violence reports, said, “The State Education Department has devoted considerable resources and taken the initiative to address concerns that have been voiced in order to create an environment where all schools are reporting in a consistent and uniform manner.”

In Rome, the high school is a source of pride in a down-on-its-luck city that was built on a copper industry long since faded away. In 1995, the closing of Griffiss Air Force Base led to an exodus of military families and businesses that further crippled the community; the gleaming new high school opened on its grounds in 2002. Today, Rome is perhaps best known as the home of two state prisons.

The predominantly white high school, where more than one-third of the students qualify for free or low-cost lunches, has a graduation rate of 78 percent, just above the statewide average of 77 percent.

The school’s new home is a brick-and-glass showpiece in a business and development park, the frame of the military base’s chapel incorporated into the cafeteria.

Joelle Taylor, who was school board president when the school moved from an old building downtown, said fighting increased shortly afterward because students were no longer allowed to leave school during the day, so violence that might have occurred off campus moved on campus.

In response, the district secured a $7.8 million federal grant last year for violence prevention, and drew on it to pay for a police officer, a probation officer and a substance abuse counselor at the high school. The district spent two years developing a policy, which takes effect this fall, that broadly defines violence as “any word, look, sign, or act that hurts a person’s body, feelings or things.”

At Rome Free Academy, the sectional sofas in the lobby have been replaced with wood benches so students are less inclined to linger. A flier above a water fountain advertises a new anger management group. And students sent to the principal’s office for fighting are often redirected to an outdoor obstacle course where they have to work together to complete assigned tasks.

During a school open house last week, Mr. Benson, the principal, reassured parents that the school was safe. “I’m not sure what the state is hoping to accomplish with this list,” he said afterward. “It’s gotten us bad publicity, and it certainly doesn’t help.”

Elizabeth Monahan, the senior class president, said that the student newspaper would protest the school’s inclusion on the watch list in editorials, and that her relatives now asked if she felt threatened at school.

“It makes me very sad because we work so hard to portray ourselves as a really good school,” said Ms. Monahan, 17, a fourth-generation Rome Free Academy student.

    A Very Violent School, or Just Very Honest?, NYT, 8.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/nyregion/08rome.html