History > 2007 > USA > Education (III)

College Costs Rising Rapidly

October 22, 2007
The New York Times
By JONATHAN D. GLATER

Tuition and fees at public and private colleges and universities rose at more than double the rate of inflation, the College Board said in reports released this morning.

One report found that while the pace of increase has held steady at four-year private institutions, it has picked up at public ones.

The increases in the cost of higher education continue to drive up the amount that students and families borrow, with the greatest increase coming in private loans, according to a separate College Board report also released this morning.

Tuition and other costs, not including room and board, rose to $6,185 at public four-year colleges this year, up 6.6 percent from last year, while tuition at private colleges hit $23,712, an increase of 6.3 percent. At public two-year institutions, average tuition and fees rose 4.2 percent to $2,361.

Last year, tuition and fees at public institution rose by 5.7 percent; at private ones, by 6.3 percent and at public two-year institutions, by 3.8 percent.

“The average price of college is continuing to rise more rapidly than the consumer price index, more rapidly than prices in the economy,” Sandy Baum, a co-author of the report who is a senior policy analyst for the College Board and a professor at Skidmore College, told reporters at a news conference this morning. She added that the prices “are probably higher than most of us want them to be.”

Those price hikes reflect increases in the sticker price that colleges advertise, though, Ms. Baum said, the average student does not pay that full amount. At public universities, the average student gets about $3,600 in grants and tax benefits, lowering the actual cost to around $2,600. At private institutions, aid totals about $9,300, bringing the cost to $14,400.

But even the net price, after taking into account grants and other forms of aid, is rising more quickly than prices of other goods and than family incomes. In recent years, consumer prices have risen by less than 3 percent a year, while net tuition at public colleges has risen by 6.6 percent and at private ones, 4.6 percent.

The changes in tuition at public institutions closely track changes in financing they receive from state governments and other public sources, the report found. When state and local support for public colleges declined over the last seven years, tuition and fees rose more quickly, and as state support has grown of late, the pace of increases fell, it said.

“We hope that state governments — which really set tuition prices at most public colleges and universities — will do their part to reinvest in higher education,” David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, said in a statement released by the College Board.

Private loans, those not guaranteed by the federal government, continued to be the fastest growing form of borrowing, totaling more than $17 billion in the 2006-07 academic year. In the same period, students and their families borrowed $59.6 billion in federally guaranteed loans.

The report on borrowing also included data on loans by full-time students at for-profit institutions, finding that in 2003-04, they took out an average of $6,750 in loans, approaching the $7,320 borrowed by students at private colleges, $5,390 by those at public four-year institutions and $3,180 at public two-year ones.

Last year the average Pell grant, the federal government’s grant to the neediest students, declined for the second year in a row, after taking into account the effects of inflation. Ms. Baum, the economist, said she expected that decline to halt because Congress recently enacted increases in the maximum amount of the grant, which had held constant at $4,050 for four years.

“The grants for low-income students haven’t been growing fast enough,” Ms. Baum said. As a result the share of tuition that a Pell grant can cover has declined steadily. The increases mandated by Congress will gradually boost the maximum Pell grant to $5,400 over the next five years, helping to preserve its purchasing power, Ms. Baum said.

The College Board’s study drew on responses from 2,976 institutions to questionnaires sent out last October, as well as government agencies and organizations like the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

According to the study, the cost of room and board has also continued to rise and at many public colleges dwarfs actual tuition. At four-year public institutions, tuition, room and board on average now total $13,589; at private colleges, $32,307.

Ms. Baum emphasized that while the College Board reports provide information on what is happening in general to the cost of higher education, students and parents should not base their expectations on the reports. Costs vary in different parts of the country as well as at different kinds of colleges, she said.

“The average numbers don’t tell the story for any individual student,” Ms. Baum said.

    College Costs Rising Rapidly, NYT, 22.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/education/21cnd-tuition.html

AP:

Sexual Misconduct Plagues US Schools

October 21, 2007
Filed at 7:21 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

The young teacher hung his head, avoiding eye contact. Yes, he had touched a fifth-grader's breast during recess. ''I guess it was just lust of the flesh,'' he told his boss.

That got Gary C. Lindsey fired from his first teaching job in Oelwein, Iowa. But it didn't end his career. He taught for decades in Illinois and Iowa, fending off at least a half-dozen more abuse accusations.

When he finally surrendered his teaching license in 2004 -- 40 years after that first little girl came forward -- it wasn't a principal or a state agency that ended his career. It was one persistent victim and her parents.

Lindsey's case is just a small example of a widespread problem in American schools: sexual misconduct by the very teachers who are supposed to be nurturing the nation's children.

Students in America's schools are groped. They're raped. They're pursued, seduced and think they're in love.

An Associated Press investigation found more than 2,500 cases over five years in which educators were punished for actions from bizarre to sadistic.

There are 3 million public school teachers nationwide, most devoted to their work. Yet the number of abusive educators -- nearly three for every school day -- speaks to a much larger problem in a system that is stacked against victims.

Most of the abuse never gets reported. Those cases reported often end with no action. Cases investigated sometimes can't be proven, and many abusers have several victims.

And no one -- not the schools, not the courts, not the state or federal governments -- has found a surefire way to keep molesting teachers out of classrooms.

Those are the findings of an AP investigation in which reporters sought disciplinary records in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The result is an unprecedented national look at the scope of sex offenses by educators -- the very definition of breach of trust.

The seven-month investigation found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misconduct.

Young people were the victims in at least 1,801 of the cases, and more than 80 percent of those were students. At least half the educators who were punished by their states also were convicted of crimes related to their misconduct.

The findings draw obvious comparisons to sex abuse scandals in other institutions, among them the Roman Catholic Church. A review by America's Catholic bishops found that about 4,400 of 110,000 priests were accused of molesting minors from 1950 through 2002.

Clergy abuse is part of the national consciousness after a string of highly publicized cases. But until now, there's been little sense of the extent of educator abuse.

Beyond the horror of individual crimes, the larger shame is that the institutions that govern education have only sporadically addressed a problem that's been apparent for years.

''From my own experience -- this could get me in trouble -- I think every single school district in the nation has at least one perpetrator. At least one,'' says Mary Jo McGrath, a California lawyer who has spent 30 years investigating abuse and misconduct in schools. ''It doesn't matter if it's urban or rural or suburban.''

One report mandated by Congress estimated that as many as 4.5 million students, out of roughly 50 million in American schools, are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade. That figure includes verbal harassment that's sexual in nature.

Jennah Bramow, one of Lindsey's accusers in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, wonders why there isn't more outrage.

''You're supposed to be able to send your kids to school knowing that they're going to be safe,'' says Bramow, now 20. While other victims accepted settlement deals and signed confidentiality agreements, she sued her city's schools for failing to protect her and others from Lindsey -- and won. Only then was Lindsey's teaching license finally revoked.

As an 8-year-old elementary-school student, Bramow told how Lindsey forced her hand on what she called his ''pee-pee.''

''How did you know it was his pee-pee?'' an interviewer at St. Luke's Child Protection Center in Cedar Rapids asked Jennah in a videotape, taken in 1995.

'''Cause I felt something?'' said Jennah, then a fidgety girl with long, dark hair.

''How did it feel?'' the investigator asked.

''Bumpy,'' Jennah replied. She drew a picture that showed how Lindsey made her touch him on the zipper area of his pants.

Lindsey, now 68, refused multiple requests for an interview. ''It never occurs to you people that some people don't want their past opened back up,'' he said when an AP reporter approached him at his home outside Cedar Rapids and asked questions.

That past, according to evidence presented in the Bramow's civil case, included accusations from students and parents along with reprimands from principals that were filed away, explained away and ultimately ignored until 1995, when accusations from Bramow and two other girls forced his early retirement. Even then, he kept his teaching license until the Bramows took the case public and filed a complaint with the state.

Like Lindsey, the perpetrators that the AP found are everyday educators -- teachers, school psychologists, principals and superintendents among them. They're often popular and recognized for excellence and, in nearly nine out of 10 cases, they're male. While some abused students in school, others were cited for sexual misconduct after hours that didn't necessarily involve a kid from their classes, such as viewing or distributing child pornography.

They include:

-- Joseph E. Hayes, a former principal in East St. Louis, Ill. DNA evidence in a civil case determined that he impregnated a 14-year-old student. Never charged criminally, his license was suspended in 2003. He has ignored an order to surrender it permanently.

-- Donald M. Landrum, a high school teacher in Polk County, N.C. His bosses warned him not to meet with female students behind closed doors. They put a glass window in his office door, but Landrum papered over it. Police later found pornography and condoms in his office and alleged that he was about to have sex with a female student. His license was revoked in 2005.

-- Rebecca A. Boicelli, a former teacher in Redwood City, Calif. She conceived a child with a 16-year-old former student then went on maternity leave in 2004 while police investigated. She was hired to teach in a nearby school district; board members said police hadn't told them about the investigation.

The overwhelming majority of cases the AP examined involved teachers in public schools. Private school teachers rarely turn up because many are not required to have a teaching license and, even when they have one, disciplinary actions are typically handled within the school.

Two of the nation's major teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, each denounced sex abuse while emphasizing that educators' rights also must be taken into account.

''Students must be protected from sexual predators and abuse, and teachers must be protected from false accusations,'' said NEA President Reg Weaver, who refused to be interviewed and instead released a two-paragraph statement.

Kathy Buzad of the AFT said that ''if there's one incident of sexual misconduct between a teacher and a student that's one too many.''

The United States has grown more sympathetic to victims of sex abuse over recent decades, particularly when it comes to young people. Laws that protect children from abusers bear the names of young victims. Police have made pursuing Internet predators a priority. People convicted of abuse typically face tough sentences and registry as sex offenders.

Even so, sexually abusive teachers continue to take advantage, and there are several reasons why.

For one, many Americans deny the problem, and even treat the abuse with misplaced fascination. Popular media reports trumpet relationships between attractive female teachers and male students.

''It's dealt with in a salacious manner with late-night comedians saying 'What 14-year-old boy wouldn't want to have sex with his teacher?' It trivializes the whole issue,'' says Robert Shoop, a professor of educational administration at Kansas State University who has written a book aimed at helping school districts identify and deal with sexual misconduct.

''In other cases, it's reported as if this is some deviant who crawled into the school district -- 'and now that they're gone, everything's OK.' But it's much more prevalent than people would think.''

The AP investigation found efforts to stop individual offenders but, overall, a deeply entrenched resistance toward recognizing and fighting abuse. It starts in school hallways, where fellow teachers look away or feel powerless to help. School administrators make behind-the-scenes deals to avoid lawsuits and other trouble. And in state capitals and Congress, lawmakers shy from tough state punishments or any cohesive national policy for fear of disparaging a vital profession.

That only enables rogue teachers, and puts kids who aren't likely to be believed in a tough spot.

In case after case the AP examined, accusations of inappropriate behavior were dismissed. One girl in Mansfield, Ohio, complained about a sexual assault by teacher Donald Coots and got expelled. It was only when a second girl, years later, brought a similar complaint against the same teacher that he was punished.

And that second girl also was ostracized by the school community and ultimately left town.

Unless there's a videotape of a teacher involved with a child, everyone wants to believe the authority figure, says Wayne Promisel, a retired Virginia detective who has investigated many sex abuse cases.

He and others who track the problem reiterated one point repeatedly during the AP investigation: Very few abusers get caught.

They point to several academic studies estimating that only about one in 10 victimized children report sexual abuse of any kind to someone who can do something about it.

Teachers, administrators and even parents frequently don't, or won't, recognize the signs that a crime is taking place.

''They can't see what's in front of their face. Not unlike a kid in an alcoholic family, who'll say 'My family is great,''' says McGrath, the California lawyer and investigator who now trains entire school systems how to recognize what she calls the unmistakable ''red flags'' of misconduct.

In Hamburg, Pa., in 2002, those ''red flags'' should have been clear. A student skipped classes every day to spend time with one teacher. He gave her gifts and rides in his car. She sat on his lap. The bond ran so deep that the student got chastised repeatedly -- even suspended once for being late and absent so often. But there were no questions for the teacher.

Heather Kline was 12, a girl with a broad smile and blond hair pulled back tight. Teacher Troy Mansfield had cultivated her since she was in his third-grade class.

''Kids, like, idolized me because they thought I was, like, cool because he paid more attention to me,'' says Kline, now 18, sitting at her mother's kitchen table, sorting through a file of old poems and cards from Mansfield. ''I was just like really comfortable. I could tell him anything.''

He never pushed her, just raised the stakes, bit by bit -- a comment about how good she looked, a gift, a hug.

She was sure she was in love.

By winter of seventh grade, he was sneaking her off in his car for an hour of sex, dropping in on her weekly baby-sitting duties, e-mailing about what clothes she should wear, about his sexual fantasies, about marriage and children.

Mansfield finally got caught by the girl's mother, and his own words convicted him. At his criminal trial in 2004, Heather read his e-mails and instant messages aloud, from declarations of true love to explicit references to past sex. He's serving up to 31 years in state prison.

The growing use of e-mails and text messages is leaving a trail that investigators and prosecutors can use to prove an intimate relationship when other evidence is hard to find.

Even then, many in the community find it difficult to accept that a predator is in their midst. When these cases break, defendants often portray the students as seducers or false accusers. However, every investigator questioned said that is largely a misconception.

''I've been involved in several hundred investigations,'' says Martin Bates, an assistant superintendent in a Salt Lake City school district. ''I think I've seen that just a couple of times ... where a teacher is being pursued by a student.''

Too often, problem teachers are allowed to leave quietly. That can mean future abuse for another student and another school district.

''They might deal with it internally, suspending the person or having the person move on. So their license is never investigated,'' says Charol Shakeshaft, a leading expert in teacher sex abuse who heads the educational leadership department at Virginia Commonwealth University.

It's a dynamic so common it has its own nicknames -- ''passing the trash'' or the ''mobile molester.''

Laws in several states require that even an allegation of sexual misconduct be reported to the state departments that oversee teacher licenses. But there's no consistent enforcement, so such laws are easy to ignore.

School officials fear public embarrassment as much as the perpetrators do, Shakeshaft says. They want to avoid the fallout from going up against a popular teacher. They also don't want to get sued by teachers or victims, and they don't want to face a challenge from a strong union.

In the Iowa case, Lindsey agreed to leave without fighting when his bosses kept the reason for his departure confidential. The decades' worth of allegations against him would have stayed secret, if not for Bramow.

Across the country, such deals and lack of information-sharing allow abusive teachers to jump state lines, even when one school does put a stop to the abuse.

While some schools and states have been aggressive about investigating problem teachers and publicizing it when they're found, others were hesitant to share details of cases with the AP -- Alabama and Mississippi among the more resistant. Maine, the only state that gave the AP no disciplinary information, has a law that keeps offending teachers' cases secret.

Meanwhile, the reasons given for punishing hundreds of educators, including many in California, were so vague there was no way to tell why they'd been punished, until further investigation by AP reporters revealed it was sexual misconduct.

And in Hawaii, no educators were disciplined by the state in the five years the AP examined, even though some teachers there were serving sentences for various sex crimes during that time. They technically remained teachers, even behind bars.

Elsewhere, there have been fitful steps toward catching errant teachers that may be having some effect. The AP found the number of state actions against sexually abusive teachers rose steadily, to a high of 649 in 2005.

More states now require background checks on teachers, fingerprinting and mandatory reporting of abuse, though there are still loopholes and a lack of coordination among districts and states.

U.S. Supreme Court rulings in the last 20 years on civil rights and sex discrimination have opened schools up to potentially huge financial punishments for abuses, which has driven some schools to act.

And the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification keeps a list of educators who've been punished for any reason, but only shares the names among state agencies.

The uncoordinated system that's developed means some teachers still fall through the cracks. Aaron M. Brevik is a case in point.

Brevik was a teacher at an elementary school in Warren, Mich., until he was accused of using a camera hidden in a gym bag to secretly film boys in locker rooms and showers. He also faced charges that he recorded himself molesting a boy while the child slept.

Found guilty of criminal sexual conduct, Brevik is now serving a five- to 20-year prison sentence and lost his Michigan license in 2005.

What Michigan officials apparently didn't know when they hired him was that Brevik's teaching license in Minnesota had been permanently suspended in 2001 after he allegedly invited two male minors to stay with him in a hotel room. He was principal of an elementary school in southeastern Minnesota at the time.

''I tell you what, they never go away. They just blend a little better,'' says Steve Janosko, a prosecutor in Ocean County, N.J., who handled the case of a former high school teacher and football coach, Nicholas J. Arminio.

Arminio surrendered his New Jersey teaching license in 1994 after two female students separately accused him of inappropriate touching. The state of Maryland didn't know that when he applied for teaching credentials and took a job at a high school in Baltimore County. He eventually resigned and lost that license, too.

Even so, until this month, he was coaching football at another Baltimore County high school in a job that does not require a teaching license. After the AP started asking questions, he was fired.

Victims also face consequences when teachers are punished.

In Pennsylvania, after news of teacher Troy Mansfield's arrest hit, girls called Kline, his 12-year-old victim, a ''slut'' to her face. A teacher called her a ''vixen.'' Friends stopped talking to her. Kids no longer sat with her at lunch.

Her abuser, meanwhile, had been a popular teacher and football coach.

So, between rumors that she was pregnant or doing drugs and her own panic attacks and depression, Kline bounced between schools. At 16, she ran away to Nashville.

''I didn't have my childhood,'' says Kline, who's back home now, working at a grocery cash register and hoping to get her GED so she can go to nursing school. ''He had me so matured at so young.

''I remember going from little baby dolls to just being an adult.''

The courts dealt her a final insult. A federal judge dismissed her civil suit against the school, saying administrators had no obligation to protect her from a predatory teacher since officials were unaware of the abuse, despite what the court called widespread ''unsubstantiated rumors'' in the school. The family is appealing.

In Iowa, the state Supreme Court made the opposite ruling in the Bramow case, deciding she and her parents could sue the Cedar Rapids schools for failing to stop Lindsey.

Bramow, now a young mother who waits tables for a living, won a $20,000 judgment. But Lindsey was never criminally charged due to what the former county prosecutor deemed insufficient evidence.

Arthur Sensor, the former superintendent in Oelwein, Iowa, who vividly recalls pressuring Lindsey to quit on Feb. 18, 1964, regrets that he didn't do more to stop him back then.

Now, he says, he'd call the police.

''He promised me he wouldn't do it again -- that he had learned. And he was a young man, a beginning teacher, had a young wife, a young child,'' Sensor, now 86 years old, said during testimony at the Bramows' civil trial.

''I wanted to believe him, and I did.''

------

John Parsons, special projects manager for the AP's News Research Center, contributed to this story.

    AP: Sexual Misconduct Plagues US Schools, NYT, 21.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Teacher-Sex-Abuse.html

Failing Schools Strain to Meet U.S. Standard

October 16, 2007
The New York Times
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
 

LOS ANGELES — As the director of high schools in the gang-infested neighborhoods of the East Side of Los Angeles, Guadalupe Paramo struggles every day with educational dysfunction.

For the past half-dozen years, not even one in five students at her district’s teeming high schools has been able to do grade-level math or English. At Abraham Lincoln High School this year, only 7 in 100 students could. At Woodrow Wilson High, only 4 in 100 could.

For chronically failing schools like these, the No Child Left Behind law, now up for renewal in Congress, prescribes drastic measures: firing teachers and principals, shutting schools and turning them over to a private firm, a charter operator or the state itself, or a major overhaul in governance.

But more than 1,000 of California’s 9,500 schools are branded chronic failures, and the numbers are growing. Barring revisions in the law, state officials predict that all 6,063 public schools serving poor students will be declared in need of restructuring by 2014, when the law requires universal proficiency in math and reading.

“What are we supposed to do?” Ms. Paramo asked. “Shut down every school?”

With the education law now in its fifth year — the one in which its more severe penalties are supposed to come into wide play — California is not the only state overwhelmed by growing numbers of schools that cannot satisfy the law’s escalating demands.

In Florida, 441 schools could be candidates for closing. In Maryland, some 49 schools in Baltimore alone have fallen short of achievement targets for five years or more. In New York State, 77 schools were candidates for restructuring as of last year.

Some districts, like those in New York City, have moved forcefully to shut large failing high schools and break them into small schools. Los Angeles, too, is trying small schools, along with other innovations, and David L. Brewer III, its schools superintendent, has just announced plans to create a “high priority district” under his direct control made up of 40 problem schools.

Yet so far, education experts say they are unaware of a single state that has taken over a failing school in response to the law. Instead, most allow school districts to seek other ways to improve.

“When you have a state like California with so many schools up for restructuring,” said Heinrich Mintrop, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “that taxes the capacity of the whole school change industry.”

As a result, the law is branding numerous schools as failing, but not producing radical change — leaving angry parents demanding redress. California citizens’ groups have sued the state and federal government for failing to deliver on the law’s promises.

“They’re so busy fighting No Child Left Behind,” said Mary Johnson, president of Parent U-Turn, a civic group. “If they would use some of that energy to implement the law, we would go farther.”

Ray Simon, the deputy federal secretary of education, said states that ignored the law’s demands risked losing federal money or facing restrictions on grants. For now, Mr. Simon said, the department is more interested in helping states figure out what works than in punishment. “Even a state has to struggle if it takes over a school,” he said.

A federal survey last year showed that in 87 percent of the cases of persistently failing schools, states and school districts avoided wholesale changes in staff or leadership. That is why, Mr. Simon said, the Bush administration is proposing that Congress force more action by limiting districts’ options in responding to hard-core failure.

In California, Jack O’Connell, the state superintendent of schools, calls the law’s demands unreasonable. Under the federal law, 700 schools that California believed were getting substantially better were counted last year as failing. A state takeover of schools, Mr. O’Connell said, would be a “last option.”

“To have a successful program,” he said, “it really has to come from the community.”

Under the No Child law, a school declared low-performing for three years in a row must offer students free tutoring and the option to transfer. After five years, such schools are essentially treated as irredeemable, with the law prescribing starting over with a new structure, new leadership or new teachers. But it also gives schools the option of less sweeping changes, like reducing school size or changing who is in charge of hiring.

Those in charge of troubled schools in Los Angeles admit that the absence of serious penalties coupled with the growing number of schools branded as low-performing is breeding bitterness. But they are not sure what to do.

Carmen Schroeder, the superintendent of District 5 — and Ms. Paramo’s boss — has taken over hiring decisions and keeps a close watch on the lowest performing schools. Ms. Schroeder said she would like to go further and shut some down if there were any place to transfer the students.

That is not so easy when 59 of the 91 schools in her district, the largest of eight in this sprawling city, consistently fall short of standards.

Beyond that, the federal law does not trump contract agreements, and so teachers have generally not lost their jobs or faced transfer when schools stagnate.

In Los Angeles, as the law’s 2014 deadline draws nearer, the promised land of universal high achievement seems more distant than ever.

Schools that serve low-income students are packed, despite new construction. In poor neighborhoods, students are on staggered schedules, starting school in different months and scattering what was once summer vacation into smaller breaks.

Students lose momentum, forget lessons and come out with 17 fewer days of instruction a year. “That’s why our kids are not passing the high school exit exams,” said Ms. Johnson of Parent U-Turn.

Not all states are facing huge numbers of failing schools. Some were late establishing testing systems, and so lack results over five or more years. Others may have small poor populations, better teaching or easier exams.

But the tensions voiced here are echoed by parents elsewhere, as well as by school officials.

At Woodrow Wilson High one recent morning, teachers broke into small groups over coffee studying test scores for areas of weakness. But there were limits to what they would learn.

The teachers analyzed results for the entire school, not for their own students. Roberto Martinez, the principal, said he had not given teachers the scores of their own students because their union objects, saying the scores were being used to evaluate teachers.

“And who suffers?” asked Veronica Garcia, an English teacher at Wilson. “The kids suffer, because the teacher never gets feedback.”

A. J. Duffy, president of United Teachers of Los Angeles, said the union supported test score reviews provided they did not affect teachers’ jobs. Mr. Duffy said the federal law glossed over the travails of teaching students living in poverty. “Everyone agrees that urban education needs a shot in the arm, but it is not as bleak as the naysayers would have it,” he said.

That is not a view shared by many parents. Martha Sanchez, whose three children attend public schools here, said that as students grew older, the schools seemed to give up.

Her eldest, Gonzalo, attends eighth grade at John Adams Middle School, where only 22 percent of students passed the state exams in English and math this year. It is not hard for Ms. Sanchez to see why.

When Gonzalo struggled over equations, she said, his teacher called him slow rather than going over the material again. Ms. Sanchez said that she had complained, but that the teacher had denied the comment. It was only through the private tutoring, available under No Child Left Behind that he managed to pass seventh grade math, she said.

The principal, Joseph P. Santana, said he did not recall Ms. Sanchez’s complaining, but could not rule it out. “There are 1,600 of them,” he said, referring to the students, “and only one of me.”

Still, Ms. Sanchez is not a big fan of the law. Just weeks into the school year, she said, teachers are focusing almost solely on material likely to appear on state exams. Forget about igniting a passion in children, she said.

“Maybe the system is not designed for people like us,” she said.

    Failing Schools Strain to Meet U.S. Standard, NYT, 16.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/education/16child.html?hp

Mom Charged With Buying Pa. Teen Weapons

October 12, 2007
Filed at 12:24 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NORRISTOWN, Pa. (AP) -- The mother of a 14-year-old who authorities say had a cache of guns, knives and explosive devices in his bedroom for a possible school attack was charged Friday with buying her son three weapons.

Michele Cossey, 46, bought her home-schooled son, Dillon, a .22-caliber handgun, a .22-caliber rifle and a 9 mm semiautomatic rifle, authorities said.

The teenager felt bullied and tried to recruit another boy for a possible attack at Plymouth Whitemarsh High School, authorities said. His mother was not accused of helping plot an attack, ''but by virtue of her indulgence, she enabled him to get in this position,'' Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr. said.

''This is not the best parenting I've ever seen and she needs to be held accountable,'' Castor said.

Acting on a tip from a high school student and his father, police on Wednesday found the rifle, about 30 air-powered guns, swords, knives, a bomb-making book, videos of the 1999 Columbine attack in Colorado and violence-filled notebooks in the boy's bedroom, Castor said.

The mother bought the rifle, which had a laser scope, at a gun show on Sept. 23 and provided police with a receipt, investigators said in court papers. The teenager said the two .22-caliber weapons were stored at a friend's house.

She was charged with unlawful transfer of a firearm, possession of a firearm by a minor, corruption of a minor, endangering the welfare of a child and two counts of reckless endangerment, and later released on bail. She did not comment at the hearing.

The teen, who also had a brief court appearance Friday, was ordered held at a juvenile facility while he undergoes psychiatric evaluations. He was charged with solicitation to commit terror and other counts, but his lawyer, J. David Farrell, stressed that all but one of the weapons prosecutors put on display were pellet guns and air rifles.

Farrell noted it is not illegal in Pennsylvania for a minor to fire a weapon under adult supervision and said he didn't believe the students at Plymouth Whitemarsh were in any danger.

''They're showing 30 guns on a desk that appear to be handguns and saying this was a Columbine in the making,'' Farrell said. ''That's simply not borne out by the facts.''

Authorities said Friday that the boy's father also tried to buy his son a rifle in 2005, but was not allowed to because he was a felon, authorities said Friday.

Frank Cossey was sentenced to house arrest for lying about his criminal record when he went to buy a .22-caliber rifle for his son in December 2005, police said Friday. On his application he said he had never been convicted of a felony, but he had pleaded guilty in 1981 to manslaughter in a drunken driving death in Oklahoma and sent to prison, police said.

The teen previously attended middle school in the district but had been taught at home for more than a year after voluntarily leaving school, Castor said. Castor has said he does not believe and attack was imminent or would occur at all. He said Friday that the teen had a ''disturbed mind.''

''This was a smart kid that clearly believes he was picked on and was a victim,'' Castor said. ''He had psychological issues and began to act out on those feelings.''

The arrest came the same day a 14-year-old in Ohio opened fire at his Cleveland high school, wounding four before killing himself.

------

Associated Press writer JoAnn Loviglio in Philadelphia contributed to this story.

    Mom Charged With Buying Pa. Teen Weapons, NYT, 12.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Student-Arsenal.html

Edwards to Help South Carolina Schools

October 11, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:18 a.m. ET
The New York Times

DARLINGTON, S.C. (AP) -- Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on Thursday was to release a plan where teachers in poor, rural schools in early voting South Carolina would get a raise of up to $15,000 and 4-year-old kindergarten would be available to all children.

Edwards was to propose a six-part plan intended to improve rural schools in South Carolina, where eight poor school districts have sued the state, challenging the way legislators fund public schools. The former North Carolina senator was scheduled to visit several rural schools Thursday.

Edwards has previously released some of the proposals. However, this plan was repackaged specifically for South Carolina, according to his campaign.

Edwards is not the only Democratic candidate to visit schools in this rural area. In August, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama visited a dilapidated school and said more federal funding was needed. And New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's first radio ad in the state referenced the rural schools.

The school districts' lawsuit has drawn national attention and spurred a documentary about conditions at the schools, dubbed the ''Corridor of Shame.'' A ruling in the lawsuit is currently being appealed by the districts.

In his proposal, Edwards said college scholarships should be offered to students who commit to teaching in rural areas and a national university should be created to train teachers to serve in these areas.

Federal resources should be used to build or expand 1,000 schools and South Carolina's dismal graduation rate could be improved with second-chance schools for dropouts and smaller, alternative schools for students at risk of dropping out, according to the proposal.

Edwards, who was born in a rural area in the northwest part of South Carolina, also said he would reverse the cuts President Bush made to special education grants.

The so-called ''Corridor of Shame'' runs along Interstate 95 and the schools are predominantly black. Nearly half of the 2004 Democratic primary voters here were black.

    Edwards to Help South Carolina Schools, NYT, 11.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Edwards-Rural-Schools.html

Gunman Opens Fire at Cleveland High School

October 10, 2007
The New York Times
By MARIA NEWMAN

A student who allegedly opened fire inside a Cleveland high school today was killed after he shot and wounded several people, creating moments of sheer terror for students, school officials and parents, according to local news outlets.

The Cleveland television station WOIO-19, a CBS affiliate, reported that the gunman may have been a 14-year-old student, and that he was killed after a brief manhunt by police inside the school, the SuccessTech Academy.

There is no official word yet on whether the gunman died of his own hand or was killed by police who descended on the school, which is housed on several floors of an office building on Lakeside Avenue.

Several students and parents told reporters that the student who was killed had been recently suspended, that he drew a gun inside the school, and that his shots hit several people. Two of the victims may have been teachers, according to local television reports.

“The student had two guns, one in each hand, and fired them both while walking down the hallway,” Channel 19 reported. “Three people have been shot — including two teachers.”

Televised scenes outside the school showed dozens of police cars, SWAT team members running in and terrified parents being reunited with their children coming out of the school. The television station showed three gurneys being wheeled out of the school and loaded into ambulances.

One student told The Associated Press that she heard the principal say “Code Blue” over the public address system, and that prompted students to start running.

Doneisha LeVert said she hid in a closet in the building with some of her friends, The A.P. reported.

Ronnell Jackson, 15, told the news agency that he saw three people brought out of the building on gurneys, The A.P. said.

Mr. Jackson said he ducked out of the door of the school when he saw a shooter running down the hall.

“He was about to shoot me, but I got out just in time,” he said. “He was aiming at me — I got out just in time.”

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported on its web site that city police were called to the school at 1:15 p.m. Eastern time and that paramedics were summoned to Room 310, where one person was shot, and to Room 415, where another was shot in the lower chest. SuccessTech is a nontraditional public high school whose mission, according to its web site, is “Problem-based service learning with an emphasis on technology.” Some administrative offices are also located in the building.

    Gunman Opens Fire at Cleveland High School, NYT, 10.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/us/10cnd-shooting.html?hp

Bush Pushes Congress on 'No Child' Law

October 10, 2007
Filed at 4:47 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said that he's open to new ideas for changing the ''No Child Left Behind'' education law but will not accept watered-down standards or rollbacks in accountability.

The president and lawmakers in both parties want changes to the five-year-old law -- a key piece of his domestic policy legacy, which faces a tough renewal fight in Congress.

''There can be no compromise on the basic principle: Every child must learn to read and do math at, or above, grade level,'' he said in a statement Tuesday from the Rose Garden that was directed at Congress and critics of the law. ''And there can be no compromise on the need to hold schools accountable to making sure we achieve that goal.''

The law requires annual math and reading tests in grades three through eight and once in high school. Schools that miss benchmarks face increasingly tough consequences, such as having to replace their curriculum, teachers or principals.

Earlier, Bush and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings met with civil rights leaders, educators and advocates for minority and disadvantaged students.

Almost everyone agrees the law should be changed to encourage schools to measure individual student progress over time instead of using snapshot comparisons of certain grade levels.

There also is broad agreement that the law should be changed so that schools that miss progress goals by a little don't face the same consequences as schools that miss them by a lot.

There are, however, deep divisions over some proposed changes, including merit pay for teachers and whether schools should be judged based on test scores in subjects other than reading and math.

Opponents to some of the legislative proposals come from the conservative and liberal wings of Congress.

National Urban League President Marc Morial, who was in the meeting with Bush, said the law hasn't been funded even to the levels authorized in the original legislation. But he and others did not lay the blame entirely at Bush's feet.

''Both Congress and the president should make the collective funding of this act a priority,'' Morial said.

Morial said he and others also talked to Bush about addressing the disparity in the amount of money committed to educating children in different parts of the country, and about strengthening a provision in the law calling for after-school services to help children who fall behind.

Bush listed several ways for enhancing the law:

--Give local leaders more flexibility and resources.

--Offer other educational options to families of children stuck in low-performing schools.

--Increase access to tutoring programs.

--Reward good teachers who improve student achievement in low-income schools.

--Expand access to advanced placement courses.

--Improve math and science instruction.

The president noted national test results released last month that showed elementary and middle schoolers posting across-the-board gains in math and more modest improvements in reading. But he also noted that nearly half of Hispanic and black students still do not graduate from high school on time.

------

AP Education Writer Nancy Zuckerbrod contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS that Laura Bush did not attend event.)

    Bush Pushes Congress on 'No Child' Law, NYT, 10.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html

For Schools, Lottery Payoffs Fall Short

October 7, 2007
The New York Times
By RON STODGHILL and RON NIXON

Last year, North Carolina’s governor, Mike Easley, finally delivered on his promise to start a lottery, making his state the most recent of the 42 states and the District of Columbia to cash in on legalized gambling.

If some voters in this Bible Belt state frowned on Mr. Easley’s push to bring gambling here, others were persuaded by his argument that North Carolina’s students were missing out on as much as $500 million in aid annually as residents crossed the border to buy lottery tickets elsewhere.

“Our people are playing the lottery,” the governor said in an address two years ago that was a prelude to the creation of the North Carolina Education Lottery. “We just need to decide which schools we should fund, other states’ or ours.”

Pitches like this have become popular among lawmakers who, since states began legalizing lotteries more than 40 years ago, have sold gambling as a savior for cash-starved public schools and other government programs. Lotteries have raised billions of dollars, and of the 42 states that have them, 23 earmark all or some of the money for education.

For years, those states have heard complaints that not enough of their lottery revenue is used for education. Now, a New York Times examination of lottery documents, as well as interviews with lottery administrators and analysts, finds that lotteries accounted for less than 1 percent to 5 percent of the total revenue for K-12 education last year in the states that use this money for schools.

In reality, most of the money raised by lotteries is used simply to sustain the games themselves, including marketing, prizes and vendor commissions. And as lotteries compete for a small number of core players and try to persuade occasional customers to play more, nearly every state has increased, or is considering increasing, the size of its prizes — further shrinking the percentage of each dollar going to education and other programs.

In some states, lottery dollars have merely replaced money for education. Also, states eager for more players are introducing games that emphasize instant gratification and more potentially addictive forms of gambling.

Of course, the question of how much lotteries contribute to education has been around for years. But the debate is particularly timely now that at least 10 states and the District of Columbia are considering privatizing their lotteries, despite assurances decades ago that state involvement would blunt social problems that might emerge from an unregulated expansion of lotteries. These trends fly in the face of marketing campaigns that often emphasize lotteries’ educational benefits, like a South Carolina lottery slogan, “Big Fun, Bright Futures,” or an ad campaign in North Carolina featuring a thank-you note passed through schools and signed “The Students.” The New York Lottery’s Web site includes the tagline, “Raising billions to educate millions.”

Promotions like these have taken root. Surveys and interviews indicate that many Americans in states with lotteries linked to education think their schools are largely supported by lottery funds — so much so that they even mention this when asked to vote for tax increases or bond authorizations to finance their schools.

A Growing Industry

Long a mainstay of American life, lotteries began as raffles in the 1700s to finance the Continental Army, bridges and roads, and Columbia University. But modern lotteries are big businesses, run by streamlined enterprises with managers and consultants from Fortune 500 companies.

State lotteries raised more than $56 billion and returned $17 billion to the state governments last year. They spent more than $460 million last year on advertising, making them one of the nation’s largest marketers. The 197,000 retailers that sell lottery products earned $3.3 billion in commissions in 2006.

Lottery advocates say the games live up to their public mandate. According to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, $234 billion has gone into state coffers since the first modern lottery was started in New Hampshire in 1964.

“Lotteries bring additional money to states that can be used very effectively to fund special projects without raising taxes,” said Charles Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, a nonprofit group.

But among the states that earmark lottery money for education, lottery dollars accounted for 1 percent or less of the total K-12 education financing (including all state, federal and local revenue) last year in at least five states, including New Jersey. New York had the highest percentage, 5.3 percent.

(Five states — Georgia, Kentucky, New Mexico, South Carolina and Tennessee — direct lottery dollars primarily to college scholarships. North Carolina and Florida also give some money to scholarships.)

At least five states — California, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio and Washington — channel lottery money to higher education as well as elementary and secondary schools. In these states, too, lottery proceeds amount to less than 5 percent of the total education financing.

In at least four states — California, Illinois, Michigan and Texas — lottery dollars as a percentage of K-12 education money has declined or remained flat over the last decade.

In California, for example, the lottery in 1985 accounted for almost 5 percent of all K-12 education dollars. Today, it makes up less than 2 percent, or about $1 billion, of the $54 billion the state spends on in K-12 education, according to the California Budget Project, a nonprofit research group in Sacramento.

The California Department of Education addressed this in its State Fact Book two years ago: “Although the public still perceives the lottery as making a significant difference in the funds available for education,” the book read, “it is a minor source that cannot be expected to provide major improvements in K-12 education.”

Some state lotteries have fallen short of projections. In North Carolina, where officials expected the lottery to generate $400 million to $500 million a year for education, revenue reached just over $300 million in its first full year of operations. In Oklahoma, officials expected schools to receive $52 million last year from the lottery, but the final tally was $15 million less.

Also, the portion of lottery money going to state programs is shrinking. When Missouri passed its lottery in 1985, it required that at least 45 percent of all proceeds go to the state, and the number went as high as 52 percent. Legislators revised the law, and now the state gets about 30 percent of proceeds.

The Times review of documents from all 42 states with lotteries and the District of Columbia found that nearly all have increased payouts and lowered the percentage going to programs. And those that have not changed their payout formulas are considering it.

Lawmakers and lottery officials defend the practices, saying schools and other programs will still benefit from the extra money raised by lotteries.

“Too much of the focus is on percentages,” said Gardner Gurney, acting director of the New York lottery. “My focus is on dollars. You can’t spend percentages.”

In 2000, New York State kept 38 percent of its lottery revenue for education. That share has dropped to 32 percent, but the dollar amount rose from $1.3 billion in 2000 to $2.2 billion last year.

But Jerry McPeak, a Democratic state representative in Oklahoma, said states that have committed to a percentage should not later lower that number.

“I think if you pass a lottery and tell people that a certain proportion of those dollars are going to something like education, then you ought to keep your word,” Mr. McPeak said.

School Budgets in Flux

In some states, lottery dollars are pooled with other funds, making it impossible to determine how much the lottery benefits schools. That is the case in Michigan, Texas and Illinois.

Because legislators in these states decide school budgets well in advance of knowing what lottery revenue will be, lottery money is just another part of the overall budget. If the lottery dollars are below projections, the state makes up the shortfall with money from other sources, or in some cases, simply gives schools less money. If the lottery dollars exceed projections, the state uses some of the money for other programs.

“Legislators merely substitute general revenue funds with lottery dollars so the schools don’t really gain any additional funding,” said O. Homer Erekson, dean of the business school at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, who co-wrote a national study on lottery money and school financing.

States including Georgia, Oklahoma and South Carolina have enacted laws that prohibit substituting lottery dollars for money that would have otherwise gone to education. But such laws have not stopped legislators.

Oklahoma, for example, used lottery money last year for a portion of promised teacher raises that were supposed to come from the general fund. The move provoked an angry response from education officials and some legislators.

In Nebraska, from 2002 through the last fiscal year, legislators diverted lottery dollars from the state’s K-12 education and other programs into the general fund to make up for a shortfall.

“Diverting lottery funds into the general fund was one of many ways to make up for the lost revenues,” said Bruce Snyder, a supervisor in the accounting office at the Nebraska Department of Administrative Services.

Lottery officials say they are unfairly blamed for legislators’ decisions. “Our job is to raise money for the things the legislators want,” said Clint Harris, director of the Minnesota lottery. “We don’t have any control over what happens to the money.”

But Brett McFadden, a budget analyst with the Association of California School Administrators, said: “It makes it harder for us to convince people that they still need to support education.” He added, “They think the lottery is taking care of education. We have to tell them we’re only getting a few sprinkles; we’re not even getting the icing on the cake.”

New Games and Gimmicks

As player interest has flagged, some lotteries have responded with aggressive marketing and new products that critics say can undermine public trust.

In an effort to attract younger customers, several states have introduced video lottery terminals, in which players wager against a computer, and Keno, a bingo-like video game. Critics have labeled both kinds of games “video crack” because of their addictive nature. Fifteen states offer electronic gambling machines, and several more are considering adding them.

This year in Florida, state officials estimated that the state could raise an additional $1 billion from video terminals and $39 million to $241 million from Keno. The report also noted that both games “are considered to be more addictive than traditional lottery games and could contribute to a problem of pathological gambling.”

While introducing Keno in Florida would require legislative approval because of potential problems associated with gambling, Florida officials view the issue through an economic lens.

“We will determine which, of the products legally available to us, fits in fulfilling that mission,” said Jackie Barreiros, a spokeswoman for the Florida lottery.

Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, said many states are also introducing higher-price games, underscoring a Vegas-style rivalry among states for gambling dollars.

California’s contract with its instant ticket vendor, Scientific Games, calls for the introduction of 30 to 45 new games a year. Kansas, Texas and Michigan recently introduced a $50 scratch ticket, the most expensive in the nation.

States are also trying to bolster the number of “core” players, according to interviews with lottery officials in several states. Such players typically represent only 10 percent to 15 percent of all players but account for 80 percent of sales, according to Independent Lottery Research, which does research and marketing for state lotteries.

In North Carolina, Mr. Easley faces a battle in proving that the lottery will be a winner for voters. After its first full year, revenue was 25 percent less than projected, giving critics ammunition in their case that lottery revenue is an unreliable source of money for schools.

The governor declined to be interviewed, but Dan Gerlach, his senior policy adviser for fiscal affairs, said lottery officials had overestimated the market size of rival lotteries in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia when developing the state’s gambling efforts. But Mr. Gerlach said he expected the state to sell millions more tickets in coming months than it did last year.

That is because Mr. Easley recently persuaded his legislature to increase lottery prizes. The move will reduce the percentage of lottery dollars going to education. But North Carolina is choosing a tried and true formula: raising payouts increases customer traffic.

“People like to win big,” Mr. Gerlach said. “Now, the pot is bigger.”

    For Schools, Lottery Payoffs Fall Short, NYT, 7.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/business/07lotto.html?hp

Sun Belt Growth Is Playing Out on Campus

October 6, 2007
The New York Times
By ALAN FINDER

TEMPE, Ariz. — There are 25,341 parking spaces at Arizona State University, but don’t count on getting one for an 11 a.m. class, as Daniel Heard, a senior, learned the hard way.

“I think I got a spot once,” said Mr. Heard, who tried driving his car from his off-campus apartment the first week of classes this semester. “All the other times I had to go back home and get my bike.”

With 64,000 students, and plans to grow to more than 90,000 by 2020, Arizona State is trying to become the nation’s largest university, as it scrambles to keep up with the region’s surging population. And like other public universities in fast-growing Sun Belt states, it faces more than just logistical challenges.

Soaring numbers of students, many of them immigrants or the first generation to attend college, are seeking higher education in a landscape with far fewer private alternatives than in the East. In some states, financing lags.

“We’re expanding enrollments, we’re trying to reach the first-to-go-to-college, we’re trying to reach students whose families speak Spanish at home,” said Mark Yudof, the chancellor of the University of Texas system. “It’s extremely difficult to do all these things simultaneously, and I think it remains to be seen if we’re up to the challenge.”

At Arizona State, the president, Michael M. Crow, lured five years ago from Columbia, says that his university is up to the challenge and that he is creating a new paradigm for an American university, one that can expand exponentially, welcome a diversity of students, become a major research center and simultaneously improve.

“There’s a natural tendency to think that smaller is better,” Dr. Crow said. “But it’s not size that’s the issue. It’s can you deliver quality and size at the same time.”

Many students and professors are dubious. “I understand the need — students need a place to go,” Mr. Heard said. “But I think that growing to 100,000 students is just ridiculous. It doesn’t seem like resources are keeping up.”

The rate of growth is dizzying. Arizona State has already expanded by 14,000 students in seven years. California and Florida have also seen enrollment explode. In just the last two years, the 23 universities in the California State University system grew to 450,000 students from 410,000.

Growth has also been rapid in Nevada, but the three state universities have failed to keep up, said James E. Rogers, the chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

“We’re not growing with the quality we need,” Mr. Rogers said, adding that graduation and retention rates are “awful.” He said state financing had not kept up with the growth, and that there were too many part-time instructors.

“We do very little very well,” said Mr. Rogers, a lawyer and banker who owns television stations. His solution is the creation of a state income tax to support higher education, an idea he described as deeply unpopular in Nevada.

In parts of the California system, state money has also failed to keep up with needs, so the state’s universities increased class sizes and raised tuition.

“We don’t have the resources to increase course sections, to hire more faculty, to increase support to meet the demand,” said Patrick Lenz, the assistant vice chancellor for budget at the California State University system.

He added, “We are very concerned about the quality of education we can deliver to a growing population.”

The Florida state government faces a shortfall of more than $1 billion; in anticipation, some state universities have capped enrollment and others have imposed a hiring freeze. The University of Texas system, with nine universities, is encouraging more students to start out in community colleges and then transfer to the four-year institutions.

But few states have experienced student growth as rapid as Arizona’s. In 1990, about 31,000 students graduated from the state’s public high schools. By 2005, there were nearly 52,000 graduates. This growth is expected to continue, even if the local high schools do nothing to solve their dropout problems.

Although there are two other state universities — the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University — Arizona State, with campuses in Tempe and three other sites in metropolitan Phoenix, has agreed to absorb 90 percent of the additional demand. That means it will continue to focus largely on in-state residents. Over the last 10 years, in-state students have made up 72 percent to 76 percent of the student body.

Antonio Garcia, a professor of bioengineering, said that he supported the university’s intention to expand and improve, but that it needed to continue hiring more professors to lower its student-faculty ratio, currently 22 to 1.

Some students and professors question whether it is possible to handle so much growth so quickly. “Ninety thousand students is a lot,” said Trevor Bergeron, a sophomore. “Right now it’s pretty huge.”

Geoffrey A. Clark, an anthropology professor, said the state had pressed Arizona State to absorb too many students and was not adequately supporting the university financially. One result, he said, is that students are being taught by too many part-time professors. “In terms of what you think of as a quality education, they are not getting it,” Dr. Clark said.

Dr. Crow and his supporters among students and faculty say, however, that he has presided over a major transformation of the university. Under Dr. Crow’s administration, new interdisciplinary schools have been created. Research centers have been built. The honors college has been reinvigorated. A new campus in downtown Phoenix is under construction.

The state, which used to appropriate $300 million a year for the university’s operations, is now providing $500 million, Dr. Crow said. And graduation rates and retention of freshmen have improved.

Dr. Crow’s contract contains $150,000 in bonuses if he meets 10 performance goals next year; among them is a $10,000 bonus if the university goes up in the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Many students said they found the university’s size manageable and thought it could grow and improve simultaneously. “You have to grow because of all the population growth,” said Ben Wood-Isenberg, a sophomore from Tucson. “It’s really the only way to go if you want to continue the intellectual growth of Arizona.”

Bill Verdini, a business professor and the president of the Academic Senate, said he found Arizona State’s ambitions inspiring.

“I think we can do it; I’m very optimistic,” Dr. Verdini said. “There will be some bumps along the way.”

    Sun Belt Growth Is Playing Out on Campus, NYT, 6.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/us/06growth.html?hp

Frustration Over a $25,000 Catholic School

September 29, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID GONZALEZ

After decades of providing an affordable alternative to neighborhood public schools, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York started competing for students this year with some of the city’s pricier secular schools.

Cardinal Edward M. Egan said earlier this year that parents had asked him for a new type of school, with low student-to-teacher ratios, better facilities and a focus on the humanities. And parents in focus groups indicated they were willing to pay annual tuition of $25,000 for such an education.

This month, the Academy of St. Joseph opened in Greenwich Village, taking over the renovated building of a parish school the archdiocese closed last year after deficits grew and enrollment dwindled to about 140 students.

The new academy’s student body has a grand total of two students — one in kindergarten and one in prekindergarten. The staff outnumbers the students with a full-time principal, a secretary, two teachers and two part-time aides.

Those numbers, first reported last week in The New York Post, have elicited equal measures of anger and amusement in the world of parochial education. Principals of archdiocesan schools in poor neighborhoods decried what they saw as a subsidy for upper-middle-class families while they had to justify every penny and struggle to keep enrollments from shrinking.

Catholic educators and administrators who are well versed in starting or running schools wondered how thoroughly church officials had studied the market for the academy.

“Did they survey the parish community?” said the Rev. Aldo Tos, an educator who was pastor of St. Joseph’s parish from 1985 until his retirement in 2003. “It’s a high-income area, but the parish never benefited from that. It was not a wealthy parish, so I always had to go and beg for finances to support the school.”

Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the archdiocese, emphasized that the parish school was not closed in order to free up space for the academy. The archdiocese has provided a loan to the start-up school that must be repaid, he said.

“This school has not been and will not be getting that kind of subsidy,” Mr. Zwilling said. “We wouldn’t have a school like this if we did not believe it would be self-sufficient.”

He said that the archdiocese originally expected only a half-dozen students, but that continuing renovations prevented parents of prospective students from touring the school. An open house is scheduled in the coming weeks. He said the school would add two grades next year, and would continue growing until there were about 120 students through eighth grade.

Cardinal Egan has often declared his support for this academy and the possible conversion of other parish schools to this model during meetings with priests.

According to the minutes of one such meeting in March, he supported the more expensive schools “because there are parents who want them and we are losing their children to non-Catholic academy schools.” In other meetings he has said vacant school buildings would be better used as Catholic academies serving middle-class families than being rented to secular private schools.

Mr. Zwilling said early talks on opening the St. Joseph academy were in response to “anecdotal information” from conversations the cardinal and other officials had with parents who asked why the archdiocese did not have private academies. He said a staff member with “a background in marketing” conducted focus groups with mothers who lived in downtown Manhattan, who said they were willing to support such a school that had “extras” like music and art classes, foreign languages, science labs and a strong concentration on the humanities.

“Not that the academics of the parish schools are lacking in any way,” he said. “We are not going to turn our backs on the poor.”

Nonetheless, the academy concept has stirred up strong emotions among parents whose children had to leave St. Joseph’s parish school, where they paid about $3,500 a year in tuition.

Aziza Marulanda, a Bronx homemaker whose son, Gabriel, was in fifth grade when St. Joseph’s closed, questioned the value of a school that would cater to better-off families.

“The old school had working families of all nationalities,” said Ms. Marulanda, who is African-American. “At $25,000 I think it just pushes an institution that is supposed to be about community toward exclusivity. But even if I could afford it, I wouldn’t send my son there. It’s unlikely there would be a lot of African-American or Hispanic children.”

Her son now attends public school.

The fault lines of class are most evident in the reactions of principals at struggling urban schools who have dodged closings by finding patrons and cutting back on extras like music and art classes.

“St. Joe’s academy gets French, art, music and everything,” said one parish school principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of concern about further straining an already tense relationship with the archdiocese. “Meanwhile, I get hand-me-downs.”

Several noted that parents struggling with rent increases had transferred children to public schools to ease the strain of even modest Catholic school tuitions on their household budgets.

“Did the archdiocese feel we did not have any schools for children who come from a certain strata of society?” asked another principal, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. “That’s misguided. We already have fine schools for children. Where did it get twisted that only people who pay $25,000 should get a certain type of education?”

There is a tradition of religious orders, like the Jesuits, establishing private schools that made inculcating Catholic values part of their mission along with serving the children of the wealthy. In fact, it was typical in the 19th century for religious orders to establish academies whose tuition would be used to offset charges at free parish schools, said the Rev. Thomas Shelley, the author of a history of St. Joseph’s parish.

But the members of several religious orders said they wondered why the archdiocese was creating an academy-type school when that kind of educational option exists in the city’s independent Catholic schools.

“We have Marymount, the Convent of the Sacred Heart, St. David’s,” said one priest familiar with these schools, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to antagonize church officials. “Those are schools that are very well established and all have a network of wealthy supporters. To start off fresh and without that kind of patronage is extremely difficult. It is a very competitive market for these upscale kids, and you have to provide an extraordinary program.”

    Frustration Over a $25,000 Catholic School, NYT, 29.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/29/nyregion/29academy.html

5 Pa. Students Charged in School Threats

September 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:28 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CANTON, Pa. (AP) -- Five Pennsylvania high school students were arrested after threats of violence shut down their school district for most of the week, police said.

The 15- and 16-year-old students were charged with terroristic threats and creating a risk of catastrophe, police said Wednesday. Officials did not release details of the threats but said the teens were being held at a detention center.

Canton Police Chief Douglas Seeley said the suspects called themselves the ''Drive-By Kings.''

School officials closed the district's junior/senior high school and elementary school early on Tuesday, the day the first two were arrested. Superintendent Jeffrey Johnston said administrators were tipped off by students about the threats last week, and the school notified police. He said state police did not find weapons during a sweep of the building.

The school board, in an emergency meetings Tuesday night, canceled classes for the rest of the week and voted to look into new safety measures, including metal detectors, more security guards and a parent notification system. About 1,100 students were affected by the shutdown.

    5 Pa. Students Charged in School Threats, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-School-Threats.html

Yale Endowment Grows 28%, Topping $22 Billion

September 27, 2007
The New York Times
By GERALDINE FABRIKANT

The Yale Endowment, which has led the academic world in investment performance over the last decade, posted a 28 percent return yesterday for the fiscal year ended June 30, bringing its total value to $22.5 billion.

The endowment, which has been run by David F. Swensen since 1988, outperformed all its competitors, according to preliminary data widely circulated among endowment offices.

The Yale Endowment has had a 17.8 percent average annual return over the last decade, beating Harvard, its nearest rival in size, by 2.8 percentage points. During that 10-year period, Princeton came closest to Yale, with a 16.2 percent return.

The second-best-performing school last year was Amherst College, which generated a 27.8 percent return, to raise its value to $1.7 billion. Generally the larger university endowments do better than the smaller ones, according to data compiled by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

Among the top 10 performing endowments last year, Notre Dame, Duke, Michigan, Virginia and Northwestern all had returns over 25 percent. Notre Dame came in third behind Yale and Amherst at 25.9 percent. Harvard, which has been in the news lately because of the sudden departure of its investment chief, Mohamed A. El-Erian, posted a 23 percent return, bringing its endowment to $34.9 billion.

Many indexes also posted very strong results in the fiscal year. The Wilshire 5000 was up 19.6 percent, and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 18.36 percent, while the Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets index rose 41.76 percent.

Nevertheless, Mr. Swensen, who was an early leader in creating a strategy of investments diversified beyond stocks and bonds, outperformed rivals. He argued in his book “Pioneering Portfolio Management” that depending solely on stocks and bonds would not necessarily provide enough protection to a fund. His approach has led Yale’s endowment into hedge funds, private equity funds and hard assets like timber and oil and gas, and made his performance one that is closely watched by Wall Street.

A growing number of schools have followed suit. “What Swensen taught everyone to do was not to get the preferred return on bonds because it was too low and to control risk by diversification and careful selection of managers, and he is very good at picking managers,” said Bruce C.N. Greenwald, professor of finance at Columbia University Business School.

While fiscal 2007 was a generally bullish time for markets, the last several months have been tumultuous as the housing market debacle took its toll on many investors. Mr. Swensen said that in the last three months, the university had posted “modest positive investment returns.”

But he was noncommittal about the coming months. “Things look tough to me, but that is always the case,” he said.

While Yale’s 28 percent return appears to be the best return last year for a university endowment, in 2000 Yale had a 41 percent return, Mr. Swensen said in an e-mail message. “But the dollar gains were less because we were working with a lower base,” he wrote. “Our $5 billion of fiscal year 2007 investment gains amazes me.”

The endowment’s performance has become increasingly crucial to Yale. Projected spending from the endowment in the university’s 2007-8 fiscal year is $843 million, or 37 percent of Yale’s net revenue. The endowment’s contribution to Yale’s operating budget has increased nearly fourfold in 10 years, and is its single largest source of support.

Yale’s endowment continues to be diversified, but Mr. Swensen declined to say which asset class performed best. His target asset allocation for fiscal 2008 is fairly similar to the allocation for 2007. The biggest allocation — 28 percent of Yale’s funds — is in real assets. Last year, those included real estate, oil and gas and timberland, Yale’s report showed.

The second-largest allocation is to what Yale calls absolute return investments, which generally means hedge funds. Yale is slightly reducing that stake to 23 percent, from 25 percent, according to Mr. Swensen.

The endowment is also planning a slight reduction in domestic equities to 11 percent, from 12 percent. Fixed-income and private equity will remain at 4 percent and 15 percent respectively, and private equity is increasing 2 percentage points to 19 percent, Mr. Swensen said.

Mr. Swensen said yesterday that nearly all the numbers that universities reported were above the Cambridge Associates median 19.3 percent for colleges and universities. “This is another case of the larger endowments (with diversified, equity-oriented portfolios) doing better than the smaller endowments,” he said.

The endowment world is extremely competitive. As one expert on endowments noted, it was an easy year to have a relatively high number, but for endowment managers the question was how they did against the internal benchmarks they create for each asset class. For equities, that could be the Wilshire 5000 or the S.&P., for example. For hedge funds, it might be the performance of funds of funds that own a range of hedge funds. An equally important measure is how the endowment did against its peers.

    Yale Endowment Grows 28%, Topping $22 Billion, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/business/27yale.html

Louisiana Protest Echoes the Civil Rights Era

September 21, 2007
The New York Times
By RICHARD G. JONES

JENA, La., Sept. 20 — In a slow-moving march that filled streets, spilled onto sidewalks and stretched for miles, more than 10,000 demonstrators rallied Thursday in this small town to protest the treatment of six black teenagers arrested in the beating of a white schoolmate last year.

Chanting slogans from the civil rights era and waving signs, protesters from around the nation converged in central Louisiana, where the charges have made this otherwise anonymous town of 3,000 people a high-profile arena in the debate on racial bias in the judicial system.

“That’s not prosecution, that’s persecution,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the founder of the RainbowPUSH Coalition and an organizer of the demonstration, told a crowd in front of the LaSalle Parish Courthouse. “We will not stop marching until justice runs down like waters.”

The Jena High School students, known as the Jena Six, are part of a court case that began in December, when they were accused of beating a white classmate unconscious and kicking him and a prosecutor charged them with attempted murder.

The beating was preceded by racially charged incidents at the high school, including nooses hanging from an oak tree that some students felt was just for white students. The tree has been cut down.

One student, Mychal Bell, 17, was convicted in June of aggravated battery and conspiracy. Those charges were voided by appeals courts, most recently last Friday. Mr. Bell has not been released from jail.

Even as demonstrators marched in Jena, which is 85 percent white, an appellate court ordered an emergency hearing to determine why Mr. Bell had not been released.

Mr. Bell is the sole student who has had a trial. Amid pressure from critics, prosecutors have gradually scaled back many charges against the other five.

Although the starting incident occurred about a year ago, the case has been slow to join the national conversation. After Mr. Bell’s conviction, though, the details spread quickly on the Internet, text messaging and black talk radio.

The case has drawn the attention of President Bush, who said to reporters in Washington on Thursday, “Events in Louisiana have saddened me.”

“I understand the emotions,” Mr. Bush said. “The Justice Department and the F.B.I. are monitoring the situation down there, and all of us in America want there to be fairness when it comes to justice.”

Students, particularly those at historically black colleges, have also had a pivotal role in spreading the details. They poured into town after all-night bus rides. Many said they were happy to pick up the torch of the civil rights struggle.

“This is the first time something like this has happened for our generation,” said Eric Depradine, 24, a senior at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “You always heard about it from history books and relatives. This is a chance to experience it for ourselves.”

A sophomore schoolmate, Charley Caldwell Jr., 22, said he was moved to attend the rally by the details of the case.

“When I first heard about it,” Mr. Caldwell said, “I thought it was obscene. So I felt I had to come. When we got here, there’s nothing but white people, and they aren’t used to seeing this many people of color.”

The case also resonates for people not in college.

April Jones, 17, who traveled from Atlanta, with her parents, Diana and Derrick, said she saw the problem as one of basic fairness. Ms. Jones could not understand why the students who hung the nooses were not punished severely.

The students were briefly suspended. District Attorney J. Reed Walters said Wednesday that the action did not appear to violate any state laws.

“I just feel like every time the white people did something,” Ms. Jones said, “they dropped it, and every time the black people did something, they blew it out of proportion.”

Mr. Walters sharply criticized the nooses on Wednesday, saying: “I cannot overemphasize what a villainous act that was. The people that did it should be ashamed of what they unleashed on this town.”

A marcher, Latese Brown, 40, of Alexandria, said, “If you can figure out how to make a school yard fight into an attempted murder charge, I’m sure you can figure out how to make stringing nooses into a hate crime.”

    Louisiana Protest Echoes the Civil Rights Era, NYT, 21.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/us/21jena.html

Undercount of Violence in Schools

September 20, 2007
The New York Times
By ELISSA GOOTMAN

A sampling of large New York City high schools showed that the schools failed to notify the state of a significant number of violent or disruptive episodes in the 2004-5 school year, the city comptroller announced yesterday.

The comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., said an audit showed that the city had not ensured that all principals accurately report violence in their schools, making it difficult for the public to assess their safety.

The audit examined an array of records in 10 schools, comparing them with computerized data sent to the state. It found, for example, that officials at Brooklyn’s Boys and Girls High School informed the state of 14 cases of violence or misbehavior through a special computer system, which the state uses to comply with reporting obligations under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

But the audit also found that in 41 additional cases the state was never informed, including one rape and an instance outside the school in which two students were “about to be jumped” by gang members.

At Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School in the Bronx, 133 cases, ranging from graffiti to the removal of six students from a particularly disruptive class, were noted in school records but not placed in the computer system and sent to the state, the audit found.

On average, more than one in five episodes at the 10 schools were not reported to the state, the audit found. Reporting varied widely among the schools; some reported most incidents, while others did not.

Although the audit examined only a tiny slice of New York City’s more than 300 high schools during a year in which the specialized computer system was new, Mr. Thompson said it still showed that principals had too much discretion over how to categorize and report incidents.

“Failure to report paints an artificial and illusory picture of what’s actually going on in our schools,” Mr. Thompson said, suggesting that principals may sugarcoat what erupts in their hallways, classrooms and cafeterias. He called on the city Education Department to more thoroughly monitor how schools report safety data, saying its “lax attitude has allowed for a disturbing trend.”

City officials discounted Mr. Thompson’s audit as misleading. Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said the school system had “one of the most comprehensive reporting systems in the country.” While principals have some discretion over how to categorize violence, he said, “I believe principals and school personnel faithfully monitor it and report it in a professional way.”

Still, Mr. Klein, speaking to reporters yesterday, acknowledged that in the vast school system, it was impossible to guarantee that every disruption was appropriately documented.

“You’re talking about thousands of incidents in the city,” he said, “so we follow up and do some checking, but by and large you have to rely on the good-faith effort of the principals.”

Ernest A. Logan, president of the principals’ union, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, said principals at the audited schools were “not intentionally underreporting.”

“The comptroller is right when he says guidelines and instructions can be vague and open to interpretation,” Mr. Logan said. “A lot of work is already being done on that end.”

In announcing his findings, Mr. Thompson referred to an April memorandum, first reported in The Daily News, in which an assistant principal at Jamaica High School in Queens forbade all deans from making 911 calls, presumably in an effort to keep serious disturbances under the radar. The Education Department has condemned the memo and removed the school’s principal.

“Recently,” Mr. Thompson said, “we’ve heard from school officials who don’t alert proper authorities when incidents occur because they want to decrease their schools’ crime statistics.”

Elayna Konstan, chief executive of the city Education Department’s Office of School and Youth Development, said the system for reporting safety data to the state had greatly improved since the period the audit covered, saying, “What we see in ’04-5 is not what we have now.” She noted that the Police Department also collects data on school violence.

Brian Fleischer, the Education Department’s auditor general, said the state did not even require that schools report on some of the minor incidents cited in the audit.

A spokesman for the State Education Department said it was still reviewing the audit.

In his yearly Mayor’s Management Report, a set of statistics on government performance that was released yesterday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg reported that major felony crime was down 2 percent in schools, to 1,164 instances in 2007 from 1,187 in the 2006 fiscal year. Major felony crimes, he reported, were down 22 percent in a group of schools that got extra police attention after being identified as violent.

Merryl H. Tisch, a member of the Board of Regents from New York City, said that while she believed that the procedures for reporting school crimes had tightened in recent years, “to the extent that any audit shows that there was a discrepancy, we need to investigate, ask really tough questions and make sure that the discrepancy is understandable.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in a statement that the audit confirmed the union’s own contention that some schools underreport violence.

“Making schools seem safer than they really are does a disservice to parents, students and educators because those schools don’t get the attention and resources they need to be made safer, putting everyone inside at risk,” she said.

    Undercount of Violence in Schools, NYT, 20.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/nyregion/20schools.html

Alumna Gives $128 Million to High School

September 19, 2007
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

It probably would never have happened if Harvard University had not rejected Warren E. Buffett’s business school application in 1950. But a string of events originating with Mr. Buffett’s disappointment led yesterday to a Quaker high school’s receiving a gift that dwarfs some college endowments: $128 million.

Officials at George School, a prep school in Bucks County, Pa., were reeling from the contribution, believed to be one of the largest ever to a secondary school. “All I could say was things like, ‘Wow, this is overwhelming,’ ” said Anne Storch, the school’s chief fund-raiser.

It all began when Mr. Buffett, long before he became the celebrated investor, was rejected by Harvard and attended Columbia instead. A business professor there, David L. Dodd, was so impressed that after Mr. Buffett returned home to Nebraska and formed an investment partnership, Professor Dodd invested some of his own money for himself and his daughter.

Mr. Buffett soon acquired a then-obscure textile company named Berkshire Hathaway, and over the years made his professor and many other early investors rich.

Professor Dodd’s daughter, Barbara Dodd Anderson, an alumna of the high school, yesterday used much of the fortune from that original investment to endow George School, a private, 500-student institution set on a leafy 240-acre campus in Newtown, Pa.

“It was hard for me at first, because it seems like a ghastly amount of money, but it’s going for a worthy cause,” said Ms. Anderson, who lives in Fresno, Calif., where she was once a kindergarten teacher.

“I’m 75 years old, I have Alzheimer’s, and I’m probably not going to be around a lot longer,” Ms. Anderson said. “So I might as well see the money do some good.”

Ms. Anderson said that Mr. Buffett’s own breathtaking donation, the $37 billion he gave to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation last year to improve health and education across the United States and in poor nations, inspired her to make her donation.

In an interview, Mr. Buffett said Professor Dodd had turned his life around in 1950, when he graduated from the University of Nebraska and was applying to business school. Harvard rejected his application, and that August, well after Columbia’s application deadline, Mr. Buffett wrote to Professor Dodd, whom he admired as the author of a respected financial text.

“Dear Professor Dodd, I thought you were dead, but now that I know that you’re alive, I’d like to come study with you,” Mr. Buffett said he wrote in his letter.

“And he admitted me to Columbia!” Mr. Buffett said. “I would not be who I am today without David Dodd. If in response to my letter he’d said, ‘Sorry, its too late,’ I’d never be where I am.”

“Harvard did me a big favor by turning me down,” he said. “But I haven’t made any contributions to them in thanks for that.”

Mr. Buffett said Ms. Anderson’s gift was one of several vast philanthropic contributions made recently by largely unknown and uncelebrated people who have profited immensely by the appreciation of the stock of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment and insurance holding company.

Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, for instance, received roughly $200 million in the late 1990s from Donald and Mildred Othmer, friends of Mr. Buffett.

“One fellow who talked to me recently said he had done something with $1 billion,” Mr. Buffett said. “A lot of people get older and they’re not really sure what to do with their money if they’ve got a lot of it. But I’m sure Barbara was always going to give it to something worthwhile.”

Ms. Anderson, born in June 1932, grew up in New York City. Her father enrolled her at George School in 1946, and she graduated four years later. She attended St. Lawrence University and earned an M.A. from Columbia Teachers College before marrying and settling in Fresno.

In the interview, Ms. Anderson said George School had provided her with fine instruction, encouragement for her work ethic and a family away from home during years when her mother was sick. She has two grown children.

Ms. Storch of the George School said, “We did a lot of research, and as far as we know this is the largest donation ever to an existing independent school.”

The second-largest single donation to a private secondary school Ms. Storch was able to document, she said, was a 1993 gift of $100 million to Peddie School in Hightstown, N.J., by the publisher Walter Annenberg.

Comparing donations is complicated by factors like the length of time over which they are paid out. Ms. Anderson’s is to be paid over 20 years from a charitable trust, at a rate of $5 million per year for 15 years and $10.7 million per year for the last five, for a total of $128.5 million, said Ed Huff, Ms. Anderson’s accountant.

Still, even colleges dream of this kind of bequest, which dwarfs the endowments of that of Sarah Lawrence, for example, which the College Board lists at $66 million.

George School’s endowment was $77 million before Ms. Anderson’s gift, and parts of the gift will be used to build faculty housing, raise faculty salaries and finance scholarships, Ms. Storch said.

“This would be one of the largest donations to any secondary school,” said Robert F. Sharpe, a fund-raising consultant in Memphis.

    Alumna Gives $128 Million to High School, NYT, 19.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/education/19gift.html

College students struggle on history test

17 September 2007
USA Today
By Tracey Wong Briggs

Students don't know much about history, and colleges aren't adding enough to their civic literacy, says a report out today.

The study from the non-profit Intercollegiate Studies Institute shows that less than half of college seniors knew that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution or that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion. Overall, freshmen averaged 50.4% on a wide-ranging civic literacy test; seniors averaged 54.2%, both failing scores if translated to grades.

"One of the things our research demonstrates conclusively is that an increase in what we call civic knowledge almost invariably leads to a use of that knowledge in a beneficial way," says Josiah Bunting, chairman of ISI's National Civic Literacy Board. "This is useful knowledge we are talking about."

Failing Our Students, Failing America: Holding Colleges Accountable for Teaching America's History and Institutions analyzes scores of a test given to 14,419 freshmen and seniors at 50 U.S. colleges last fall on American history, government, international relations and market economy. Freshman and senior scores at the schools, 25 selective and 25 randomly chosen, were compared to gauge civic learning.

The report generally echoes the results of a similar study done last fall by the ISI, which promotes civics in higher education. This year:

•Average scores for the 25 selective colleges — chosen for type, geographic location and U.S. News & World Report ranking — were much higher than the 25 randomly selected schools for both freshmen (56.6% vs. 43.7%) and seniors (59.4% vs. 48.4%), but the elite schools didn't add as much civic knowledge between the freshman and senior years. At elite schools, the seniors averaged 2.8 points higher than the freshmen vs. 4.7 points for the randomly selected schools.

•Harvard seniors had the highest average at 69.6%, 5.97 points higher than its freshmen but still a D+. A Harvard senior posted the only perfect score.

•In general, the better a college's U.S. News & World Report ranking, the less its civic literacy gain. Yale, with the highest-scoring freshmen (68.94%), along with Princeton, Duke and Cornell, were among eight schools with freshmen outscoring seniors.

•The average senior had taken four college courses in history, economics or political science and scored 3.8 points higher than the average freshman, a civic knowledge gain of about one point per course.

•Raw scores did not correlate to voting or civic participation, but the more seniors outscored their school's freshman average, the more likely they were to vote and be involved in civic activities.

"Several of the colleges at the lower end of our survey are some of the most prestigious in the country, with average tuition, room and board somewhere north of $40,000 a year," Bunting says. "These are the schools, although their stated mission is to help prepare active citizens, that are the most derelict in their responsibility."

While freshmen at elite colleges tended to score higher to start with, there is not much of a "ceiling effect" in which gains get harder to make closer to the top, as their scores are still not that high, says Kenneth Dautrich of the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy, which administered the study.

Still, "in many cases, these students are coming from high schools where the subject matter has already been covered," notes Tony Pals of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. "It would be a waste of their tuition dollars to sit through the courses again."

To William Galston, Brookings Institution senior fellow of governance studies, the distinctions between schools aren't as clear as the general decline in the civic mission of high schools and colleges. More students are getting more formal education than students 50 years ago, he says, but today's students have fewer civics requirements as the value of higher education is more often defined in economic terms.

"Less is being expected of secondary and post-secondary education in the way of civic education, and because less is expected, less is achieved," he says.

No one would argue that college students know enough about history or the world, but a civics test may not be the best measure of civic engagement, says Debra Humphreys of the Association of American Colleges & Universities, which promotes liberal education. Other studies have shown that college students are much more likely to vote and be civically engaged than non-students, she adds.

Says Humphreys: "It would be wrong to conclude from this study that the leadership of these selective schools is not committed to educating their students about these subjects."

    College students struggle on history test, UT, 17.9.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-09-17-history-test_N.htm

Alabama Plan Brings Out Cry of Resegregation

September 17, 2007
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.

Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones.

“We’re talking about moving children from good schools into low-performing ones, and that’s illegal,” said Kendra Williams, a hospital receptionist, whose two children were rezoned. “And it’s all about race. It’s as clear as daylight.”

Tuscaloosa, where George Wallace once stood defiantly in the schoolhouse door to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama, also has had a volatile history in its public schools. Three decades of federal desegregation marked by busing and white flight ended in 2000. Though the city is 54 percent white, its school system is 75 percent black.

The schools superintendent and board president, both white, said in an interview that the rezoning, which redrew boundaries of school attendance zones, was a color-blind effort to reorganize the 10,000-student district around community schools and relieve overcrowding. By optimizing use of the city’s 19 school buildings, the district saved taxpayers millions, officials said. They also acknowledged another goal: to draw more whites back into Tuscaloosa’s schools by making them attractive to parents of 1,500 children attending private academies founded after court-ordered desegregation began.

“I’m sorry not everybody is on board with this,” said Joyce Levey, the superintendent. “But the issue in drawing up our plan was not race. It was how to use our buildings in the best possible way.” Dr. Levey said that all students forced by the rezoning to move from a high- to a lower-performing school were told of their right under the No Child law to request a transfer.

When the racially polarized, eight-member Board of Education approved the rezoning plan in May, however, its two black members voted against it. “All the issues we dealt with in the ’60s, we’re having to deal with again in 2007,” said Earnestine Tucker, one of the black members. “We’re back to separate but equal — but separate isn’t equal.”

For decades school districts across the nation used rezoning to restrict black students to some schools while channeling white students to others. Such plans became rare after civil rights lawsuits in the 1960s and ’70s successfully challenged their constitutionality, said William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights.

Tuscaloosa’s rezoning dispute, civil rights lawyers say, is one of the first in which the No Child Left Behind law has become central, sending the district into uncharted territory over whether a reassignment plan can trump the law’s prohibition on moving students into low-performing schools. A spokesman, Chad Colby, said the federal Education Department would not comment.

Tuscaloosa is not the only community where black parents are using the law to seek more integrated, academically successful schools for their children.

In Greensboro, N.C., students in failing black schools have transferred in considerable numbers to higher-performing, majority-white schools, school officials there said. A 2004 study by the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights documented cases in Florida, Indiana, Tennessee and Virginia where parents were moving their children into less-segregated schools.

Nationally, less than 2 percent of eligible students have taken advantage of the law’s transfer provisions. Tuscaloosa, with 83,000 residents, is an hour’s drive west of Birmingham. During court-ordered desegregation its schools roughly reflected the school system’s racial makeup, and there were no all-black schools.

But in recent years the board has carved the district into three zones, each with a new high school. One cluster of schools lies in the east of the city; its high school is 73 percent black.

Another cluster on Tuscaloosa’s gritty west side now amounts to an all-black minidistrict; its five schools have 2,330 students, and only 19 are white. Its high school is 99 percent black.

In contrast, a cluster of schools that draw white students from an affluent enclave of mansions and lake homes in the north, as well as some blacks bused into the area, now includes two majority-white elementary schools. Its high school, Northridge, is 56 percent black.

At a meeting in February 2005, scores of parents from the two majority white elementary schools complained of overcrowding and discipline problems in the middle school their children were sent to outside of the northern enclave.

Ms. Tucker said she, another board member and a teacher were the only blacks present. The white parents clamored for a new middle school closer to their homes. They also urged Dr. Levey to consider sending some students being bused into northern cluster schools back to their own neighborhood, Ms. Tucker said. Dr. Levey did not dispute the broad outlines of Ms. Tucker’s account.

“That was the origin of this whole rezoning,” Ms. Tucker said.

Months later, the school board commissioned a demographic study to draft the rezoning plan. J. Russell Gibson III, the board’s lawyer, said the plan drawn up used school buildings more efficiently, freeing classroom space equivalent to an entire elementary school and saving potential construction costs of $10 million to $14 million. “That’s a significant savings,” Mr. Gibson said, “and we relieved overcrowding and placed most students in a school near their home. That’s been lost in all the rhetoric.”

Others see the matter differently. Gerald Rosiek, an education professor at the University of Alabama, studied the Tuscaloosa school district’s recent evolution. “This is a case study in resegregation,” said Dr. Rosiek, now at the University of Oregon.

In his research, he said, he found disappointment among some white parents that Northridge, the high school created in the northern enclave, was a majority-black school, and he said he believed the rezoning was in part an attempt to reduce its black enrollment.

The district projected last spring that the plan would move some 880 students citywide, and Dr. Levey said that remained the best estimate available. The plan redrew school boundaries in ways that, among other changes, required students from black neighborhoods and from a low-income housing project who had been attending the more-integrated schools in the northern zone to leave them for nearly all-black schools in the west end.

Tuscaloosa’s school board approved the rezoning at a May 3 meeting, at which several white parents spoke out for the plan. One parent, Kim Ingram, said, “I’m not one who looks to resegregate the schools,” but described what she called a crisis in overcrowding, and said the rezoning would alleviate it. In an interview this month, Ms. Ingram said the middle school attended by her twin seventh-grade girls has been “bursting at the seams,” with student movement difficult in hallways, the cafeteria and locker rooms.

Voting against the rezoning were the board’s two black members and a white ally.

Dan Meissner, the board president, said in an interview this month that any rezoning would make people unhappy. “This has involved minimal disruption for a school system that has 10,000 students,” he said.

But black students and parents say the plan has proven disruptive for them.

Telissa Graham, 17, was a sophomore last year at Northridge High. She learned of the plan last May by reading a notice on her school’s bulletin board listing her name along with about 70 other students required to move. “They said Northridge was too crowded,” Telissa said. “But I think they just wanted to separate some of the blacks and Hispanics from the whites.”

Parents looking for recourse turned to the No Child Left Behind law. Its testing requirements have enabled parents to distinguish good schools from bad. And other provisions give students stuck in troubled schools the right to transfer. In a protest at an elementary school after school opened last month, about 60 black relatives and supporters of rezoned children repeatedly cited the law. Much of the raucous meeting was broadcast live by a black-run radio station.

Some black parents wrote to the Alabama superintendent of education, Joseph Morton, arguing that the rezoning violated the federal law. Mr. Morton disagreed, noting that Tuscaloosa was offering students who were moved to low-performing schools the right to transfer into better schools. That, he said, had kept it within the law.

Dr. Levey said about 180 students requested a transfer.

Telissa was one of them. She expects to return this week to Northridge, but says moving from one high school to another and back again has disrupted her fall.

One of Telissa’s brothers has also been rezoned to a virtually all-black, low-performing school. Her mother, Etta Nolan, has been trying to get him a transfer, too.

“I’m fed up,” Ms. Nolan said. “They’re just shuffling us and shuffling us.”

    Alabama Plan Brings Out Cry of Resegregation, NYT, 17.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/education/17schools.html

Editorial

Really Leaving No Child Behind

September 7, 2007
The New York Times
 

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 set ambitious new goals when it required the states to improve public schooling for all students — and to educate poor children up to the same standards as their affluent counterparts — in exchange for federal aid. The country still has a long way to go to reach those goals. And they will never be met if Congress, which must now reauthorize the law, backs away from provisions that hold schools accountable for how well and how much children learn.

The country’s largest teachers’ union, the politically powerful National Education Association, would like to see the law gutted. Fortunately, the chairman of the House education committee, George Miller, Democrat of California, has resisted those pressures. Even so, his proposed changes in the law’s crucial accountability provisions, put forth in a draft version of the House bill, may need to be recast to prevent states from backing away from the central mission of the law.

Some critics warn that one provision might allow schools to mask failures in bedrock subjects like reading and math by giving them credit for student performance in other subjects or on so-called alternate indicators. The proposed formulas are confusing, and the idea should not become a route to evasion.

But the draft contains several good ideas.

One of the most needed changes would close a huge loophole in the current Federal Title I program, which is supposed to give federal aid for the specific purpose of providing extra help to disadvantaged children, extra help that is crucial for closing the achievement gap. Congress’s original idea for Title I was to give the money to states and localities only after they had provided their schools with high poverty rates with funding levels comparable to other schools in the system. In practice, many states have continued to shortchange those high poverty schools while using Title I money to make up the difference. That needs to stop.

The draft also seeks to end the shameful but all-too-common practice of dumping inexperienced and unqualified teachers into the neediest schools.

Under the new legislation, states would be required to equitably distribute qualified teachers throughout the school system. Another important provision would require the states to create far-reaching data banks that would allow administrators to track both student and teacher performance over time, judging teachers based on how much their students actually learn.

The draft also puts meaningful targets in place for improving graduation rates. But it might allow the states too much discretion in choosing how to report them — a bad idea given the well known tendency of the states to inflate graduation rates. Another worrisome provision would allow the schools to test English language learners in their native languages for as long as seven years, as opposed to the current three. A student who entered the country in say, third grade, might actually get all the way to 10th grade before being tested in English.

If all of the nation’s children are to get the education they deserve, Congress needs to strengthen the No Child Left Behind law. Mr. Miller’s draft contains some important reforms that deserve to become law, but much of that good will be undermined if states, schools and teachers are not held accountable for the quality of education they provide.

    Really Leaving No Child Behind, NYT, 7.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/opinion/07fri1.html

Schools Open to Greet a Year Full of Change

September 5, 2007
The New York Times
By ELISSA GOOTMAN and JENNIFER MEDINA

As more than a million New York City public school students returned to class yesterday, Maria A. Aviles, the principal of Junior High School 45 in East Harlem, greeted children and reassured parents — a familiar opening-day ritual for a year that promises broad changes for the nation’s largest school system and its principals.

To make principals more accountable for their schools, the Bloomberg administration is giving them more money and unprecedented authority over an array of decisions — from curriculum to spending to teacher training — that can make or break a school. In exchange for that freedom, principals risk being removed for failure.

“We’ve tried a lot of different things,” said Mrs. Aviles, whose school’s mix of poor minority students, including many who do not speak English, represents the challenges facing the system. “There have been a lot of things that have worked, and there have been a lot of things that haven’t,” she said.

Still, she said, “I feel very optimistic that we’ve already started to change, and that this is going to be a year of transformation.”

At schools throughout the city, change was evident even amid the familiar scenes of kindergartners clinging to their mothers and high schoolers comparing back-to-school outfits.

The troubled Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, set to be closed despite a roster of prominent alumni, for the first time accepted no freshman class. It is sharing its building with three small schools that will eventually replace it.

At Jamaica High School, students arrived to find that the state had designated their school as “persistently dangerous” and that their principal, Jay A. Dickler, had been abruptly removed.

But the most closely watched hotspot was one of the city’s smallest schools, Khalil Gibran International Academy, a new school in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, devoted to Arabic language and culture. As the school’s 55 sixth graders filed in, about 70 supporters gathered with a banner welcoming them and nearly as many reporters, some from other countries, arrived to document the opening.

About two dozen opponents, meanwhile, took to the steps of City Hall, charging that the academy would indoctrinate students with radical Islamic beliefs and again demanding that it be shut down.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein arrived at Public School 53 in the Morrisania section of the Bronx yesterday morning flanked by Gov. Eliot Spitzer and City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn as well as Randi Weingarten, the president of the city’s teachers’ union, and Ernest A. Logan, the president of the principals’ union.

It was a carefully choreographed display of unity for one day at least among leaders who have sparred intensely in the recent past.

“In the new school year, we are ready to take student success to the next level, because while our schools are getting better, we need to do even more,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “There will be even greater accountability,” he said, citing as a prime example new report cards in which schools will be given letter grades of A through F.

Mr. Spitzer used the occasion to note the additional $700 million in state aid that the city schools will receive this year, the first influx of billions more dollars the state has promised as a result of a 14-year court battle over school financing. Still, the governor emphasized that the city would have to meet several state requirements to receive a portion of the money.

“Writing a check is easy,” Mr. Spitzer said. “Ensuring that there is accountability, ensuring that we then get the result that we care about is the much more difficult task.”

Mr. Klein went on to visit schools in the four other boroughs.

As television cameras awaited the mayor, Beatrice Dones used her video camera to capture her son Mark, 5, as he headed off to the first grade, a Power Rangers backpack on his shoulders.

Asked what he was most excited about, Mark exclaimed: “Homework!”

But outside Public School-Intermediate School 194 in the Bronx, Hannah Beauchampe, 5, her hair pulled back in two tight pigtails, sobbed to her mother that she was not ready to start kindergarten. “Mommy, please don’t make me,” she pleaded.

At one of the city’s temporary registration centers, also at P.S.-I.S. 194, parents whose children were not placed in schools or were seeking transfers waited, sometimes for hours.

“People talk about No Child Left Behind, but believe me, there are children being left behind today,” said Hancel Brooks, whose daughter was trying to transfer to a high school closer to the family’s Bronx home.

At Khalil Gibran, where the founding principal resigned before school began after trying to defend the word intifada on a T-shirt, the school’s supporters held a banner reading “New Yorkers Support the Khalil Gibran School,” and set up a table loaded with hummus, pitas and apple juice.

“The school is a vision of tolerance,” said Rabbi Michael Feinberg of the Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition.

After dismissal, Adnane Rhoulam, 12, said he and other students had learned to count to three in Arabic and to say “hello” three different ways. Adnane, whose mother is from Morocco, said he hoped to “understand more about what my mom’s talking about.”

Mr. Klein, speaking to reporters, described the outcry against the school as “tragic,” saying, “I think most New Yorkers understand the importance of dual language education. The school is going to open up and do well.”

But the school’s opponents continued their campaign against it. “I’m heartsick to see that our good mayor and our good chancellor are part of a program to destroy the American public school system,” said Rabbi Aryeh Spero, who said he is president of a group called Caucus for America.

At Jamaica High School, a sign on the school’s front lawn still proclaimed Mr. Dickler to be the principal, and students and parents debated how dangerous the school really was and who bore the blame.

Terrence Stith, 16, a sophomore, said he met the school’s new interim acting principal during football practice last week.

“He said he was going to stop all the violence,” Terrence said. “The way he was talking it seemed like it could be a good thing. But with Principal Dickler there wasn’t that much violence. They’re taking it too far.”

Sharlene Joseph, 15, said she occasionally felt unsafe at school, particularly when fights would break out in the hallways. Still, she said of Mr. Dickler, “I think he was doing a pretty good job.”

Mr. Dickler, reached yesterday evening, declined to comment.

At Lafayette, Juan M. Camilo, a math teacher, mourned the decision to close the school and said it had left him questioning his own effectiveness.

Mr. Camilo said he was optimistic that this year would be better than last, when teachers sparred bitterly with the school’s former principal. But he noted, “You always feel good on the first day.”

Reporting was contributed by Kate Hammer, Kai Ma, Colin Moynihan and David K. Randall.

    Schools Open to Greet a Year Full of Change, NYT, 5.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/nyregion/05school.html?hp

Virginia Tech Criticized for Actions in Shooting

August 30, 2007
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

RICHMOND, Va., Aug. 29 — A state panel has sharply criticized decisions made by Virginia Tech before and after last April’s shooting massacre, saying university officials could have saved lives by notifying students and faculty members earlier about the killings on campus.

Because university officials misunderstood federal privacy laws as forbidding any exchange of a student’s mental health information, the panel’s long-awaited report concludes, they missed numerous indications of the gunman’s mental health problems.

After a judge ordered the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, to receive outpatient mental health care for making suicidal statements, Mr. Cho scheduled an appointment at the campus counseling center but was given only a pre-appointment interview, the report said, and no follow-up appointment occurred. Records of the interview are missing, and Mr. Cho’s parents were never informed by campus or local officials of his statements or brief commitment to a mental health facility, the report said.

The panel, convened by Gov. Tim Kaine to investigate the April 16 shooting in Blacksburg that left 33 people dead, including Mr. Cho, planned to release its report on Thursday. Instead, it did so late Wednesday after being informed that The New York Times had obtained a copy, according to an e-mail from the governor’s office.

Though the report’s criticism was strong, it concluded that a campuswide lockdown after the first shootings, a double homicide, would have been impractical and probably ineffective in stopping Mr. Cho, 23.

“There does not seem to be a plausible scenario of a university response to the double homicide that could have prevented the tragedy of considerable magnitude on April 16,” the report said. “Cho had started on a mission of fulfilling a fantasy of revenge.”

But if the university had issued an alert earlier or canceled classes after Mr. Cho shot his first two victims, before moving on to shoot the rest in a classroom building, the death toll might have been lower, the report said. It found that even after university officials had learned the full scope of the massacre, their messages to students played down the unfolding emergency as a “routine police procedure.”

“The events were highly disturbing and there was no way to sugarcoat them” in disseminating the news, the report said. “Straight facts were needed.”

Campus and local police responses were “well-coordinated,” the report said, but university police officers erred in prematurely concluding that their initial lead in the double homicide was a good one. The police initially believed the shooting was an isolated domestic dispute and erroneously pursued a suspect who they thought had left the campus.

“They did not take sufficient action with what might happen if the initial lead proved erroneous,” said the report, which was written by an eight-member panel that was led by W. Gerald Massengill, a former state police superintendent, and included former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, as well as other mental health, security and education specialists.

In a raucous conference call with the governor’s office on Wednesday night, family members of victims voiced frustration that the university had not imposed a lockdown after the first shootings and criticized the report for not demanding that some officials be fired.

“Can you explain how 32 people were killed and no one has been fired, no one has been held accountable at that university?” one family member on the conference call asked.

“I can’t answer that question,” responded Larry Roberts, the chief counsel in the governor’s office, adding that panel members did not consider it their job to make personnel recommendations.

The report, consisting of 147 pages and 14 appendices, said that while the campus police knew of Mr. Cho’s repeated instances of inappropriate behavior and his stay at a mental health facility, that information never reached campus workers who deal with troubled students. Contrary to what university officials believed, the report said, federal privacy laws would have allowed them to communicate some information about Mr. Cho’s mental health problems among local, state and campus security officials.

“Information privacy laws cannot help students if the law allows sharing, but agency policy or practice forbids necessary sharing,” it concludes. The report also said “passivity” and lack of resources had hampered local and campus mental health workers.

A spokesman for Virginia Tech said officials there had not received a copy of the report and could not comment on it.

The panel said it found no clear explanation for why the gunman had selected his first two victims in a dormitory before moving on to a classroom building. While the report did not shed new light on Mr. Cho’s motives, it traced his violent fantasies to the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado.

After that massacre, Mr. Cho’s middle school teachers in Fairfax County, Va., observed suicidal and homicidal thoughts in his writings and recommended psychiatric counseling, which he received. He also received medication in those years for a short time, the report said.

The panel’s findings come a week after the university released its own report recommending ways to improve security and mental health systems.

Campus officials said they were leaving it to the governor’s panel to critique the university’s handling of Mr. Cho as a student and the decisions made by security officials in the emergency.

The release of the report, which was originally planned to occur last Monday on the first day of the fall semester at Virginia Tech, has been repeatedly delayed, and in recent weeks some victims’ families have voiced frustrations at being denied a representative on the panel.

Some relatives have expressed concern at the potential for bias in having former law enforcement officials in charge of investigating decisions made by law enforcement officials.

The panel initially struggled to obtain records of Mr. Cho’s encounters with the mental health system, but Mr. Kaine issued an executive order in June that gave the group greater access to health and academic records that are protected by privacy laws.

The report largely sidesteps the Second Amendment debate about access to guns in the state and the nation. It cites “deep divisions in American society regarding the ready availability of rapid-fire weapons and high-capacity magazines,” stating that this debate was beyond its scope.

The report commends Mr. Kaine for having closed the loophole that allowed people like Mr. Cho, who had been mandated to receive outpatient mental health treatment, to buy guns. But it says a change is still needed in the state legal code to address the problem, and it calls for state legislation to establish “the right of every institution of higher education in the commonwealth to regulate the possession of firearms on campus if it so desires.”

The report said Mr. Cho’s purchase of two guns violated federal law because he had been judged to be a danger to himself and ordered to undergo outpatient mental health treatment.

“There is confusion on the part of universities as to what their rights are for setting policy regarding guns on campus,” it said, recommending that Virginia require background checks for all firearms sales, including those at gun shows.

The report said that in a paper in a middle-school English class Mr. Cho indicated that he “wanted to repeat Columbine.” He was sent to a psychiatrist, who gave him a diagnosis of “selective mutism,” or an anxiety-related refusal to speak, and major depression. He was given a prescription for the anti-depressant Paroxetine, which he took from June 1999 to July 2000, and “did quite well on this regimen.”

The doctor stopped the medication because Mr. Cho had improved.

In high school, after a teacher reported his barely audible voice to the guidance office, Mr. Cho was placed in special education for speech and emotional problems, which excused him from making oral presentations and answering teachers’ questions.

Despite Mr. Cho’s diagnosis of mutism and his educational accommodations in high school, when he applied to Virginia Tech, the university was never informed nor did it ask about Mr. Cho’s history, the report said.

It compliments the office of the chief medical examiner for its handling of the autopsies and the identification of the dead, but said that communication with families was “poorly handled.”

The report said the state’s procedures for providing professional staff members to help families get information, crisis intervention and referrals to other resources did not work.

Ariel Sabar contributed reporting.

    Virginia Tech Criticized for Actions in Shooting, NYT, 30.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/us/30school.html?hp

In Troubled District, School Starts With Enough Books but Not Enough Money

August 29, 2007
The New York Times
By WINNIE HU

ROOSEVELT, N.Y., Aug. 22 — Students returning to school here can expect to find some things they have learned to do without in the five years their district has been under state control: enough textbooks for everyone, correct class assignments, even toilet paper in the bathrooms.

But after hiring new teachers and adding Advanced Placement classes, the 2,800-student district in Nassau County faces an $8 million debt. It expects to run short of cash for salaries, buses and utilities by October unless the State Legislature authorizes a bailout, without which district administrators say they will have to borrow more or shut the schools.

“It’s like a sword of Damocles; you’re kind of waiting and waiting and holding your breath,” said William J. Brosnan, the state-appointed interim superintendent. He took over in July after the previous superintendent resigned amid criticism over the deficit. “It’s very serious if you can’t pay your bills.”

After decades of mismanagement and weak student performance, in 2002 Roosevelt became the only one of more than 700 school districts in New York ever taken over by the Education Department, which has since poured about $200 million into the district for improvements, including new buildings.

Five years on, the mounting financial crisis has elicited outrage and recriminations from parents, teachers and community leaders over what they see as the state’s failure to turn around a struggling district that is almost entirely black and Hispanic; four out of five students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-rate lunch.

“It’s worse today than when they took it over,” said Frank Scott, co-chairman of the Roosevelt Watch Society, a community group formed in 2005 to scrutinize school operations. “You have parents and taxpayers who are so beaten down they don’t know what to do. They just give up.”

Some critics have called for the district to be consolidated with those of more affluent nearby communities, saying that Roosevelt lacks the tax base to support its own school system. Many residents have long contended that the state takeover was engineered, in large part, to keep their students out of better-off districts.

“New York State has no solution for the school district, so it’s keeping it on life support,” said Alan Singer, an education professor at Hofstra University in Hempstead. “Roosevelt has become the state’s Iraq. It’s a quagmire and it cannot get out.”

The state education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, said it had been difficult to oversee the district’s finances because administrators were often late in providing financial reports and information about purchases.

Mr. Mills said he did not use the state’s special authority to appoint a full-time fiscal administrator for the district until last year because he did not realize the extent of the problems until an audit revealed lax budget practices and spending controls that were sometimes “deliberately overridden.”

“Certainly, the state — my colleagues and I — should have seen the problems earlier,” Mr. Mills said in a phone interview. “When we did see it, it was too late to prevent a deficit.”

The bailout of the Roosevelt schools has stalled in the Legislature, largely over a disagreement about who should pay the debt. In June, the State Senate passed a bill to close the fiscal gap with an advance in state aid that would be paid back over 30 years. But some Assembly members want the $8 million to be carved out of the Education Department’s budget, something the department says is unconstitutional.

The district has improved graduation rates and test scores in recent years despite its financial woes. For instance, 90 percent of fourth graders passed the English test this spring and 89 percent the math test, and the statewide averages are 68 percent in English and 80 percent in math. But among seventh graders, 40 percent passed the English test and 22 percent the math test, and the statewide averages at that level are 58 percent in English and 66 percent in math.

Even as the district has made some academic gains, many students and their parents describe a chaotic learning environment. As the schools prepare to open, the district lacks a high school principal and a permanent superintendent. Parents complain about a badly pockmarked parking lot at the high school. The football team, which won the Long Island championship last year, practices with equipment donated by other districts.

Brian Taylor, 17, said he probably could have done better than a C in his geosciences class last year if he had his own textbook to complete homework assignments, rather than having to search for answers on the Internet. Georgia Thompson, also 17, said she was one of many students who spent the first week of school last year in the guidance office trying to sort out mistakes in their schedules. “It’s not fun to go to school here with these problems,” she said, “but you can’t do anything but make the most of it.”

Under state control, Roosevelt has received an extra $6 million a year in state aid; last year, according to the state comptroller’s office, the district got about $34 million — more than half its $63 million budget — from Albany and Washington.

In addition, the state has committed more than $180 million to replace the three elementary schools with new structures — two of which have been completed — and build a new middle school and renovate the high school.

State education officials appoint the Roosevelt superintendent and four of the five school board members; the fifth was elected for the first time this spring, and the rest of the board is scheduled to return to local control by 2011. The state is also required by law to approve any purchases of $25,000 or more.

A state comptroller’s audit concluded in March that Roosevelt administrators repeatedly overestimated state aid and overspent their budget. For the 2005-6 school year, the district budgeted $25.3 million for salaries, a decrease of $1.5 million from the year before, then spent $28 million, adding 45 positions.

Ronald O. Ross, who was appointed by Mr. Mills and served as superintendent from 2004 to 2007, said he had focused on improving academic matters, adding Advanced Placement classes and a Chinese language program and strengthening the chess team, and left the finances to state officials and district business administrators. “I was trying to put in place the things the kids needed,” Mr. Ross said. “The state took it over, and they were not willing to put in the money that was needed.”

Roger Tilles, the Long Island representative on the State Board of Regents, said Mr. Ross was a polarizing figure who was quick to become defensive. He recalled how Mr. Ross once stood up at a Regents meeting and declared, “I don’t know about you, but when I wake up in the morning, my underwear says Fruit of the Loom and not Superman.”

“The state had appointed people who were, in my opinion, incompetent,” Mr. Tilles said. “It was clear that this was a job that wasn’t being handled right.”

Mr. Mills responded to Roosevelt’s financial crisis by sending 50 staff members to the district last spring to review its operations, and assigning a senior deputy commissioner to oversee the district personally. Nineteen administrative and teaching positions have been eliminated since January to cut costs, while a full-time auditor from the state comptroller’s office has been in the district since June.

District administrators say they have also made a number of academic improvements. For instance, class schedules were mailed home after first being reviewed by guidance counselors for errors. Honors math and science classes were created for ninth graders. Social studies textbooks have been updated in the elementary schools, and extra textbooks were ordered to fill shortages at the middle school and high school.

“It’s a new day in Roosevelt,” Mr. Brosnan said. “We’ve been through the crisis — the crucible — and now we’re in the rebuilding process.”

But many residents say the schools cannot move forward with an $8 million debt hanging over its head.

“I thought they were improving things until the last budget came out,” said Carrie Hall, a retired nurse with a 10-year-old son, who said she could not afford an increase in her $6,000-plus annual property taxes. “I’m thinking about selling and moving away, because it’s ridiculous.”

Robert Summerville, Roosevelt’s lone elected school board member, said he remained skeptical about the state’s promises after years of waiting.

“How many times have they run that same commercial?” he said. “I’ve been around long enough and seen enough to know there’s no substance to their claims. Until I see it, I don’t believe it.”

    In Troubled District, School Starts With Enough Books but Not Enough Money, NYT, 29.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/nyregion/29roosevelt.html

SAT Scores Dip Slightly in a More Diverse Field

August 29, 2007
The New York Times
By ALAN FINDER

Average reading and math scores on the SAT test declined slightly this year, as the number of high school students taking the standardized exam grew larger and more diverse than ever, according to a report released yesterday by the College Board on the high school class of 2007.

The average score on the critical reading part of the SAT, which used to be known as the verbal test, was 502 out of a possible score of 800 — a decline of one point from last year, but also the lowest showing in reading in 13 years.

In math, the average score for the class of 2007 declined by three points, to 515. And the average score on the SAT writing test, which was introduced two years ago, was 494, a three-point drop.

It is the second consecutive year that the College Board, the nonprofit organization administering the SAT, reported declines on the college entrance exam.

The declines for the class of 2007 were not caused by a single factor, College Board officials said. But the increase in the number of traditionally underrepresented minority and low-income students taking the test played a role, they said. So did a new requirement in Maine that all high school seniors take the exam, including those who would not in the past have viewed themselves as college bound.

Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, said in a news conference, “The larger the population you get that takes the exam, it obviously knocks down the scores.”

Wayne Camara, vice president for research and analysis at the College Board, described the declines from 2006 to 2007 as statistically insignificant.

The officials trumpeted the size of the group that took the SAT — nearly 1.5 million seniors — and the expanded diversity of the test-takers. Hispanic, black and Asian-American students accounted for 39 percent of the seniors who took the test, representing the largest proportion of minority test-takers since the SAT was introduced in 1926. In all, 35 percent of those taking the exam would be the first in their family to attend college.

Officials of the College Board noted that, in some instances, the traditional gaps in scores between minority students and all test-takers had narrowed.

“More minority students took the SAT than ever before, and they are holding their own,” said Laurence Bunin, senior vice president for operations at the College Board.

But the data also showed most minority and low-income students continuing to lag significantly behind white and affluent students. The average score for students who planned to apply for financial aid in college was 501 in critical reading and 508 in math; the average score for those who did not intend to apply for aid was 530 in critical reading and 548 in math.

Black students on average scored 433 in critical reading and 429 in math; the averages for Puerto Rican students were 459 and 454; and those for white students were 527 and 534.

Many factors account for these differences, including the quality of local schools, parents’ and students’ expectations, the rigor of coursework, and access to tutors and special classes to prepare for the SATs and other standardized tests.

Seppy Basili, senior vice president at Kaplan Inc., the education and test preparation company, said in an interview that the overall results “really foreshadow what the future will look like” as the nation’s student population diversifies and college attendance rises.

Three years ago, only a third of the students taking the SAT were members of minorities, he said, compared with 39 percent this year. “Within 10 years, we are likely to see no majority group taking the SATs,” Mr. Basili said.

Even with recent declines in average scores, the broad trend is healthy, Mr. Basili said. More students are being encouraged to go to college, which prepares them for the more sophisticated jobs being created in the economy.

In New York, Richard Mills, the state education commissioner, said the number of Hispanic students taking the SAT in the state had increased by 15 percent and the number of black students by almost 10 percent from 2006 to 2007. The average scores among New York State students in the class of 2007 were also moderately lower than in 2006: 491 in critical reading and 505 in math.

“One never wants to see the scores go down,” Mr. Mills said, “but I think the more important story here is the rapid increase of participation of children who in the past did not think they were going to college, did not aspire to it and did not take the SATs so they could get in line.”

While applauding the expansion in students’ aspirations, some educators said that the national results showed local schools were not adequately preparing poor and minority students.

“Right now we’re making progress at a glacial pace,” said Ross Wiener, vice president for program and policy at the Education Trust, a Washington group that advocates for broader access to higher education. “We need a paradigm shift on how we are preparing our students for college.”

Others questioned the College Board’s explanations for the decline in scores this year, along with a more significant drop last year. Average scores for the class of 2006, the first group to take the new three-part test that includes a writing section, showed the largest decline in 31 years: five points in critical reading and two in math.

“The 10-year trend shows math scores steadily rising and critical reading scores moderately rising until the new test was introduced, and suddenly they plunged,” said Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, which opposes the broad use of standardized testing.

Since the diversity of students taking the SAT was also increasing as scores advanced over the last decade, Mr. Schaeffer said it made no sense to argue that diversity was the cause of the recent declines. He said also that the new test might have been more difficult in recent years.

“The answer they are giving doesn’t fit the data,” he said.

Figures released this month by ACT, a rival college entrance exam that is more popular in the Midwest, showed a slight performance increase for the class of 2007.

SAT Scores Dip Slightly in a More Diverse Field, NYT, 29.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/education/29SAT.html

Schools Fight for Teachers

Because of High Turnover

August 27, 2007
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

GREENSBORO, N.C. — The retirement of thousands of baby boomer teachers coupled with the departure of younger teachers frustrated by the stress of working in low-performing schools is fueling a crisis in teacher turnover that is costing school districts substantial amounts of money as they scramble to fill their ranks for the fall term.

Superintendents and recruiters across the nation say the challenge of putting a qualified teacher in every classroom is heightened in subjects like math and science and is a particular struggle in high-poverty schools, where the turnover is highest. Thousands of classes in such schools have opened with substitute teachers in recent years.

Here in Guilford County, N.C., turnover had become so severe in some high-poverty schools that principals were hiring new teachers for nearly every class, every term. To staff its neediest schools before classes start on Aug. 28, recruiters have been advertising nationwide, organizing teacher fairs and offering one of the nation’s largest recruitment bonuses, $10,000 to instructors who sign up to teach Algebra I.

“We had schools where we didn’t have a single certified math teacher,” said Terry Grier, the schools superintendent. “We needed an incentive, because we couldn’t convince teachers to go to these schools without one.”

Guilford County, which has 116 schools, is far from the only district to take this route as school systems compete to fill their ranks. Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit policy group that seeks to encourage better teaching, said hundreds of districts were offering recruitment incentives this summer.

Officials in New York, which has the nation’s largest school system, said they had recruited about 5,000 new teachers by mid-August, attracting those certified in math, science and special education with a housing incentive that can include $5,000 for a down payment.

New York also offers subsidies through its teaching fellows program, which recruits midcareer professionals from fields like health care, law and finance. The money helps defer the cost of study for a master’s degree. The city expects to hire at least 1,300 additional teachers before school begins on Sept. 4, said Vicki Bernstein, director of teacher recruitment.

Los Angeles has offered teachers signing with low-performing schools a $5,000 bonus. The district, the second-largest in the country, had hired only about 500 of the 2,500 teachers it needed by Aug. 15 but hoped to begin classes fully staffed, said Deborah Ignagni, chief of teacher recruitment.

In Kansas, Alexa Posny, the state’s education commissioner, said the schools had been working to fill “the largest number of vacancies” the state had ever faced. This is partly because of baby boomer retirements and partly because districts in Texas and elsewhere were offering recruitment bonuses and housing allowances, luring Kansas teachers away.

“This is an acute problem that is becoming a crisis,” Ms. Posny said.

In June, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a nonprofit group that seeks to increase the retention of quality teachers, estimated from a survey of several districts that teacher turnover was costing the nation’s districts some $7 billion annually for recruiting, hiring and training.

Demographers agree that education is one of the fields hardest hit by the departure of hundreds of thousands of baby boomers from the work force, particularly because a slowdown in hiring in the 1980s and 1990s raised the average age of the teaching profession. Still, they debate how serious the attrition will turn out to be.

In New York, the wave of such retirements crested in the early years of this decade as teachers left well before they hit their 60s, without a disruptive teacher shortage, Ms. Bernstein said.

In other parts of the country, the retirement bulge is still approaching, because pension policies vary among states, said Michael Podgursky, an economist at the University of Missouri. California is projecting that it will need 100,000 new teachers over the next decade from the retirement of the baby boomers alone.

Some educators say it is the confluence of such retirements with the departure of disillusioned young teachers that is creating the challenge. In addition, higher salaries in the business world and more opportunities for women are drawing away from the field recruits who might in another era have proved to be talented teachers with strong academic backgrounds.

“The problem is not mainly with retirement,” said Thomas G. Carroll, the president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. “Our teacher preparation system can accommodate the retirement rate. The problem is that our schools are like a bucket with holes in the bottom, and we keep pouring in teachers.”

The commission has calculated that these days nearly a third of all new teachers leave the profession after just three years, and that after five years almost half are gone — a higher turnover rate than in the past.

All the coming and going of young teachers is tremendously disruptive, especially to schools in poor neighborhoods where teacher turnover is highest and students’ needs are greatest.

According to the most recent Department of Education statistics available, about 269,000 of the nation’s 3.2 million public school teachers, or 8.4 percent, quit the field in the 2003-4 school year. Thirty percent of them retired, and 56 percent said they left to pursue another career or because they were dissatisfied.

The federal No Child Left Behind law requires schools and districts to put a qualified teacher in every classroom. The law has led districts to focus more seriously on staffing its low-performing schools, educators said, but it does not appear to have helped persuade veteran teachers to continue their service in them.

Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a group that helps urban districts recruit teachers, said attrition often resulted from chaotic hiring practices, because novice teachers are often assigned at the last moment to positions for which they have not even interviewed. Later, overwhelmed by classroom stress, many leave the field.

Chicago and New York are districts that have invested heavily and worked with teachers unions in recent years to improve hiring and transfer policies, Mr. Daly said.

“But most of the urban districts have no coherent hiring strategy,” he said. Many receive thousands of teacher applications in the spring but leave them unprocessed until principals return from August vacations, when more organized suburban districts have already hired the most-qualified teachers, he said.

“There isn’t any maliciousness in this,” Mr. Daly said, “it’s just a conspiracy of dysfunction.”

In Guilford County, Washington Elementary School, which serves students from a housing project, had churned through several principals and most of its teachers several years ago, and had repeatedly failed to make federal testing goals, said Dr. Grier, the superintendent.

“Teachers were worried it was becoming a failing school,” Dr. Grier said. To rebuild morale, he recruited a principal from Chicago, Grenita Lathan. Her first year at Washington was a nightmare, Ms. Lathan said, because her predecessors had been so panicked to fill classroom vacancies that they had hired “just anybody.”

“All they wanted was warm bodies in the classroom,” she said. At job fairs, qualified teachers she tried to hire shunned her, she said.

Under Guilford County’s incentive program, math or reading teachers who sign on at any of 29 high-poverty schools receive bonuses of $2,500 to $10,000. They can earn additional bonuses if they raise achievement.

Those incentives helped Ms. Lathan recruit solid teachers last year, she said, and after much tutoring and hard work, students met federal testing targets. This summer all but one teacher signed up for another year.

Other Guilford County schools have also used the incentives to hire promising people.

Rebecca Rheinheimer moved from Indiana this summer, attracted by a $2,500 bonus to teach at Oak Hill Elementary, where the teaching staff has been strengthened by the use of such bonuses. The school, in High Point, met its federal testing targets this spring for the first time in several years.

Margaret Eaddy-Busch, a veteran math teacher, moved from Philadelphia this summer to teach at Dudley High, which had become known as a hard-to-staff school. She will receive a $10,000 bonus for teaching Algebra I.

“If I survived in Philly for 10 years,” Ms. Eaddy-Busch said, “I’ll do just fine here.”

But it remains unclear whether the incentive program will retain good teachers as effectively as it attracts them.

“It’s challenging to teach in these high-needs schools,” said Mark Jewell, president of the local teachers union. “These new teachers will have a trial by fire, and then it’ll be a revolving door.”

Schools Fight for Teachers Because of High Turnover, NYT, 27.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/education/27teacher.html