USA > History > 2010 > Education (I)

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Using Talk and Play to Develop Minds

NYT

8.2.2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/opinion/l08teach.html 

Serious Mental Health

Needs Seen Growing at Colleges

December 19, 2010
The New York Times
By TRIP GABRIEL

STONY BROOK, N.Y. — Rushing a student to a psychiatric emergency room is never routine, but when Stony Brook University logged three trips in three days, it did not surprise Jenny Hwang, the director of counseling.

It was deep into the fall semester, a time of mounting stress with finals looming and the holiday break not far off, an anxiety all its own.

On a Thursday afternoon, a freshman who had been scraping bottom academically posted thoughts about suicide on Facebook. If I were gone, he wrote, would anybody notice? An alarmed student told staff members in the dorm, who called Dr. Hwang after hours, who contacted the campus police. Officers escorted the student to the county psychiatric hospital.

There were two more runs over that weekend, including one late Saturday night when a student grew concerned that a friend with a prescription for Xanax, the anti-anxiety drug, had swallowed a fistful.

On Sunday, a supervisor of residence halls, Gina Vanacore, sent a BlackBerry update to Dr. Hwang, who has championed programs to train students and staff members to intervene to prevent suicide.

“If you weren’t so good at getting this bystander stuff out there,” Ms. Vanacore wrote in mock exasperation, “we could sleep on the weekends.”

Stony Brook is typical of American colleges and universities these days, where national surveys show that nearly half of the students who visit counseling centers are coping with serious mental illness, more than double the rate a decade ago. More students take psychiatric medication, and there are more emergencies requiring immediate action.

“It’s so different from how people might stereotype the concept of college counseling, or back in the ’70s students coming in with existential crises: who am I?” said Dr. Hwang, whose staff of 29 includes psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and social workers. “Now they’re bringing in life stories involving extensive trauma, a history of serious mental illness, eating disorders, self-injury, alcohol and other drug use.”

Experts say the trend is partly linked to effective psychotropic drugs (Wellbutrin for depression, Adderall for attention disorder, Abilify for bipolar disorder) that have allowed students to attend college who otherwise might not have functioned in a campus setting.

There is also greater awareness of traumas scarcely recognized a generation ago and a willingness to seek help for those problems, including bulimia, self-cutting and childhood sexual abuse.

The need to help this troubled population has forced campus mental health centers — whose staffs, on average, have not grown in proportion to student enrollment in 15 years — to take extraordinary measures to make do. Some have hospital-style triage units to rank the acuity of students who cross their thresholds. Others have waiting lists for treatment — sometimes weeks long — and limit the number of therapy sessions.

Some centers have time only to “treat students for a crisis, bandaging them up and sending them out,” said Denise Hayes, the president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors and the director of counseling at the Claremont Colleges in California.

“It’s very stressful for the counselors,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like why you got into college counseling.”

A recent survey by the American College Counseling Association found that a majority of students seek help for normal post-adolescent trouble like romantic heartbreak and identity crises. But 44 percent in counseling have severe psychological disorders, up from 16 percent in 2000, and 24 percent are on psychiatric medication, up from 17 percent a decade ago.

The most common disorders today: depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, alcohol abuse, attention disorders, self-injury and eating disorders.

Stony Brook, an academically demanding branch of the State University of New York (its admission rate is 40 percent), faces the mental health challenges typical of a big public university. It has 9,500 resident students and 15,000 who commute from off-campus. The highly diverse student body includes many who are the first in their families to attend college and carry intense pressure to succeed, often in engineering or the sciences. A Black Women and Trauma therapy group last semester included participants from Africa, suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from violence in their youth.

Stony Brook has seen a sharp increase in demand for counseling — 1,311 students began treatment during the past academic year, a rise of 21 percent from a year earlier. At the same time, budget pressures from New York State have forced a 15 percent cut in mental health services over three years.

Dr. Hwang, a clinical psychologist who became director in July 2009, has dealt with the squeeze by limiting counseling sessions to 10 per student and referring some, especially those needing long-term treatment for eating disorders or schizophrenia, to off-campus providers.

But she has resisted the pressure to offer only referrals. By managing counselors’ workloads, the center can accept as many as 60 new clients a week in peak demand between October and the winter break.

“By this point in the semester to not lose hope or get jaded about the work, it can be a challenge,” Dr. Hwang said. “By the end of the day, I go home so adrenalized that even though I’m exhausted it will take me hours to fall asleep.”

For relief, she plays with her 2-year-old daughter, and she has taken up the guitar again.

Shifting to Triage

Near the student union in the heart of campus, the Student Health Center building dates from the days when a serious undergraduate health problem was mononucleosis. But the hiring of Judy Esposito, a social worker with experience counseling Sept. 11 widows, to start a triage unit three years ago was a sign of the new reality in student mental health.

At 9 a.m. on the Tuesday after the campus’s very busy weekend, Ms. Esposito had just passed the Purell dispenser by the entrance when she noticed two colleagues hurrying toward her office. Before she had taken off her coat, they were updating her about a junior who had come in the previous week after cutting herself and expressing suicidal thoughts.

Ms. Esposito’s triage team fields 15 to 20 requests for help a day. After brief interviews, most students are scheduled for a longer appointment with a psychologist, which leads to individual treatment. The one in six who do not become patients are referred to other university departments like academic advising, or to off-campus therapists if long-term help is needed. There are no charges for on-campus counseling.

This day the walk-ins included a young man complaining of feeling friendless and depressed. Another student said he was struggling academically, feared that his parents would find out and was drinking and feeling hopeless.

Professionals in a mental health center are mindful of their own well-being. For this reason the staff had planned a potluck holiday lunch. While a turkey roasted in the kitchen that serves as the break room, Ms. Esposito helped warm up candied yams, stuffing and the store-bought quiche that was her own contribution.

Just then Regina Frontino, the triage assistant who greets walk-ins at the front desk, swept into the kitchen to say a student had been led in by a friend who feared that she was suicidal.

Ms. Esposito rushed to the lobby. From a brief conversation, she knew that the distraught student would have to go to the hospital. The counseling center does not have the ability to admit suicidal or psychotic students overnight for observation or to administer powerful drugs to calm them. It arranges for them to be taken to the Stony Brook University Medical Center, on the far side of the 1,000-acre campus. The hospital has a 24-hour psychiatric emergency room that serves all of Suffolk County.

“They’re not going to fix what’s going on,” Ms. Esposito said, “but in that moment we can ensure she’s safe.” She called Tracy Thomas, an on-call counselor, to calm the student, who was crying intermittently, while she phoned the emergency room and informed Dr. Hwang, who called the campus police to transport the young woman.

When Ms. Esposito heard the crackle of police radios in the hallway, she went to tell the student for the first time that she would have to go to the hospital.

“This is not something students love to do,” Ms. Esposito recounted. The young woman told her she did not want to go. Ms. Esposito replied that the staff was worried for her safety, and she repeated the conversation she had had earlier with the young woman:

Are you having thoughts about wanting to die?

Yes.

Are you afraid you are actually going to kill yourself?

Yes.

She invited a police officer into the counseling room, and the student teared up again at the sight of him. Ms. Esposito assured her that she was not in trouble. Meanwhile, an ambulance crew arrived with a rolling stretcher, but the young woman walked out on her own with the officers.

Because Ms. Thomas, a predoctoral intern in psychology, now needed to regain her own equilibrium before seeing other clients, Ms. Esposito debriefed her about what had just happened.

Finally she returned to her office, having missed the holiday lunch, and found that her team had prepared a plate for her.

“It’s kind of like firemen,” she said. “When the fire’s on, we are just at it. But once the fire’s out, we can go back to the house and eat together and laugh.”

Reaching Out

Even though the appointment books of Stony Brook counselors are filled, all national evidence suggests that vastly more students need mental health services.

Forty-six percent of college students said they felt “things were hopeless” at least once in the previous 12 months, and nearly a third had been so depressed that it was difficult to function, according to a 2009 survey by the American College Health Association.

Then there is this: Of 133 student suicides reported in the American College Counseling Association’s survey of 320 institutions last year, fewer than 20 had sought help on campus.

Alexandria Imperato, 23, remembers that as a Stony Brook freshman all her high school friends were talking about how great a time they were having in college, while she felt miserable. She faced family issues and the pressure of adjusting to college. “You go home to Thanksgiving dinner, and the family asks your brother how is his gerbil, and they ask you, ‘What are doing with the rest of your life?’ ” Ms. Imperato said.

She learned she had clinical depression. She eventually conquered it with psychotherapy, Cymbalta and lithium. She went on to form a Stony Brook chapter of Active Minds, a national campus-based suicide-prevention group.

“I knew how much better it made me feel to find others,” said Ms. Imperato, who plans to be a nurse.

On recent day, she was one of two dozen volunteers in black T-shirts reading “Chill” who stopped passers-by in the Student Activities Center during lunch hour.

“Would you like to take a depression screening?” they asked, offering a clipboard with a one-page form to all who unplugged their ear buds. Students checked boxes if they had difficulty sleeping, felt hopeless or “had feelings of worthlessness.” They were offered a chance to speak privately with a psychologist in a nearby office. Sixteen said yes.

The depression screenings are part of a program to enlist students to monitor the mental health of peers, which is run by the four-year-old Center for Outreach and Prevention, a division of mental health services that Dr. Hwang oversaw before her promotion to director of all counseling services.

She is committed to outreach in its many forms, including educating dormitory staff members to recognize students in distress and encouraging professors to report disruptive behavior in class.

In previous years, more than 1,000 depression screenings were given to students, with 22 percent indicating signs of major depression. Dr. Hwang credits that and other outreach efforts to the swell of new cases for counseling. “For a lot of people it’s terrifying” to come to the counseling center, she said. “If there’s anything we can do to make it easier to walk in, I feel like we owe it to them.”

Stony Brook has not had a student suicide since spring 2009, unusual for a campus its size. But Dr. Hwang is haunted by the impact on the campus of several off-campus student deaths in accidents and a homicide in the past year. “With every vigil, with every conversation with someone in pain, there’s this overwhelming sense of we need to learn something,” she said. “I think about these parents who’ve invested so much into getting their kids alive to 18.”

One student who said yes to an impromptu interview with a counselor after filling out a depression screening was a psychology major, a senior from upstate New York. As it happened, Dr. Hwang had wandered over from the counseling center to check on the screenings, and the young woman spent a long time conferring with her, never removing her checked coat or backpack.

“I don’t have motivation for things anymore,” the student said afterward. “This place just depresses me the whole time.”

She had been unaware that students could walk in unannounced to the counseling center. “I thought you had to make an appointment,” she said. “Yes,” she said, “I’ll do that.”

    Serious Mental Health Needs Seen Growing at Colleges, NYT, 19.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/health/20campus.html

Is Going to an Elite College Worth the Cost?

December 17, 2010
The New York Times
By JACQUES STEINBERG

AS hundreds of thousands of students rush to fill out college applications to meet end-of-the-year deadlines, it might be worth asking them: Is where you spend the next four years of your life that important?

The sluggish economy and rising costs of college have only intensified questions about whether expensive, prestigious colleges make any difference. Do their graduates make more money? Get into better professional programs? Make better connections? And are they more satisfied with their lives, or at least with their work?

Many college guidance counselors will say, find your own rainbow. But that can sound like pablum to even the most laid-back parent and student.

Answers to such questions cannot be found, typically, in the sort of data churned out annually in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, which tend to focus on inputs like average SAT scores or college rejection rates. Handicappers shy away from collating such information partly because it can be hard to measure something like alumni satisfaction 5 to 10 years out. Moreover, in taking a yardstick to someone’s success, or quality of life, how much can be attributed to one’s alma mater, versus someone’s aptitude, intelligence and doggedness?

But economists and sociologists have tried to tackle these questions. Their research, however hedged, does suggest that elite schools can make a difference in income and graduate school placement. But happiness in life? That’s a question for another day.

Among the most cited research on the subject — a paper by economists from the RAND Corporation and Brigham Young and Cornell Universities — found that “strong evidence emerges of a significant economic return to attending an elite private institution, and some evidence suggests this premium has increased over time.”

Grouping colleges by the same tiers of selectivity used in a popular college guidebook, Barron’s, the researchers found that alumni of the most selective colleges earned, on average, 40 percent more a year than those who graduated from the least selective public universities, as calculated 10 years after they graduated from high school.

Those same researchers found in a separate paper that “attendance at an elite private college significantly increases the probability of attending graduate school, and more specifically graduate school at a major research university.”

One major caveat: these studies, which tracked more than 5,000 college graduates, some for more than a decade, are themselves now more than a decade old. Over that period, of course, the full sticker price for elite private colleges has far outstripped the pace of inflation, to say nothing of the cost of many of their public school peers (even accounting for the soaring prices of some public universities, especially in California, suffering under state budget crises).

For example, full tuition and fees at Princeton this year is more than $50,000, while Rutgers, the state university just up the New Jersey Turnpike, costs state residents less than half that. The figures are similar for the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania State University. (For the sake of this exercise, set aside those students at elite colleges whose financial aid packages cover most, if not all, of their education.)

Despite the lingering gap in pricing between public and private schools, Eric R. Eide, one of the authors of that paper on the earnings of blue-chip college graduates, said he had seen no evidence that would persuade him to revise, in 2010, the conclusion he reached in 1998.

“Education is a long-run investment,” said Professor Eide, chairman of the economics department at Brigham Young, “It may be more painful to finance right now. People may be more hesitant to go into debt because of the recession. In my opinion, they should be looking over the long run of their child’s life.”

He added, “I don’t think the costs of college are going up faster than the returns on graduating from an elite private college.”

Still, one flaw in such research has always been that it can be hard to disentangle the impact of the institution from the inherent abilities and personal qualities of the individual graduate. In other words, if someone had been accepted at an elite college, but chose to go to a more pedestrian one, would his earnings over the long term be the same?

In 1999, economists from Princeton and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation looked at some of the same data Professor Eide and his colleagues had used, but crunched them in a different way: they compared students at more selective colleges to others of “seemingly comparable ability,” based on their SAT scores and class rank, who had attended less selective schools, either by choice or because a top college rejected them.

The earnings of graduates in the two groups were about the same — perhaps shifting the ledger in favor of the less expensive, less prestigious route. (The one exception was that children from “disadvantaged family backgrounds” appeared to earn more over time if they attended more selective colleges. The authors, Stacy Berg Dale and Alan B. Krueger, do not speculate why, but conclude, “These students appear to benefit most from attending a more elite college.”)

Earnings, of course, and even graduate school attendance, are but two of many measurements of graduates’ success post-college.

Earlier this year, two labor and education professors from Penn State, along with a sociologist from Claremont Graduate University in California, sought to examine whether graduates from elite colleges were, in general, more satisfied in their work than those who attended less prestigious institutions.

Writing in April in the Journal of Labor Research, the three researchers argued that “an exclusive focus on the economic outcomes of college graduation, and from prestigious colleges in particular, neglects a host of other employment features.”

Mining a sample of nearly 5,000 recipients of bachelor’s degrees in 1992 and 1993, who were then tracked for nearly a decade, the authors concluded that “job satisfaction decreases slightly as college selectivity moves up.” One hypothesis by the authors was that the expectations of elite college graduates — especially when it came to earnings — might have been higher, and thus more subject to disappointment, than the expectations of those who graduated from less competitive colleges.

Still, one of those authors, Scott L. Thomas, a sociologist who is a professor of educational studies at Claremont, said high school students and their parents should take any attempt to apply broad generalizations to such personal choices with a grain of salt.

“Prestige does pay,” Mr. Thomas said in an interview. “But prestige costs, too. The question is, is the cost less than the added return?”

His answer was one he said he knew families would find maddening: “It depends.”

For example, someone who knew he needed to earn a reliable salary immediately after graduation, and as a result chose to study something practical like business or engineering, might find the cost-benefit analysis tilted in favor of a state school, he said.

“Students from less affluent backgrounds are going to find themselves in situations where college is less about ‘finding themselves,’ and more about skills acquisition and making contacts that will lead straight into the labor market,” Mr. Thomas said. For such a student, he said, a state university, particularly a big one, may also have a large, passionate alumni body. It, in turn, may play a disproportionate role in deciding who gets which jobs in a state in a variety of fields — an old-boy (and increasingly old-girl) network that may be less impressed with a job applicant’s Ivy league pedigree.

“If you’ve attended a big state school with a tremendous football program,” Mr. Thomas said, “there’s tremendous affinity and good will — whether or not you had anything to do with the football program.”

In the end, some researchers echo that tried-and-perhaps-even-true wisdom of guidance counselors: the extent to which one takes advantage of the educational offerings of an institution may be more important, in the long run, than how prominently and proudly that institution’s name is being displayed on the back windows of cars in the nation’s wealthiest enclaves.

In this analysis, one’s major — and how it aligns with the departmental strengths of a university — may be more significant than the place in the academic pecking order awarded to that college by the statisticians at U.S. News.

“Everything we know from studying college student experiences and outcomes tells us that there is more variability within schools than between them,” said Alexander C. McCormick, a former admissions officer at his alma mater, Dartmouth College, and now an associate professor of education at Indiana University at Bloomington.

“This is the irony, given the dominance of the rankings mentality of who’s No. 5 or No. 50,” Professor McCormick added. “The quality of that biology major offered at School No. 50? It may exceed that at School No. 5.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 17, 2010

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the RAND organization as a foundation.

    Is Going to an Elite College Worth the Cost?, NYT, 17.12.22010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/weekinreview/19steinberg.html

College, Jobs and Inequality

December 13, 2010
The New York Times


Searching for solace in bleak unemployment numbers, policy makers and commentators often cite the relatively low joblessness among college graduates, which is currently 5.1 percent compared with 10 percent for high school graduates and an overall jobless rate of 9.8 percent. Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, cited the data recently on “60 Minutes” to make the point that “educational differences” are a root cause of income inequality.

A college education is better than no college education and correlates with higher pay. But as a cure for unemployment or as a way to narrow the chasm between the rich and everyone else, “more college” is a too-easy answer. Over the past year, for example, the unemployment rate for college grads under age 25 has averaged 9.2 percent, up from 8.8 percent a year earlier and 5.8 percent in the first year of the recession that began in December 2007. That means recent grads have about the same level of unemployment as the general population. It also suggests that many employed recent grads may be doing work that doesn’t require a college degree.

Even more disturbing, there is no guarantee that unemployed or underemployed college grads will move into much better jobs as conditions improve. Early bouts of joblessness, or starting in a lower-level job with lower pay, can mean lower levels of career attainment and earnings over a lifetime.Graduates who have been out of work or underemployed in the downturn may also find themselves at a competitive disadvantage with freshly minted college graduates as the economy improves.

When it comes to income inequality, college-educated workers make more than noncollege-educated ones. But higher pay for college grads cannot explain the profound inequality in the United States. The latest installment of the groundbreaking work on income inequality by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez shows that the richest 1 percent of American households — those making more than $370,000 a year — received 21 percent of total income in 2008. That was slightly below the highs of the bubble years but still among the highest percentages since the Roaring Twenties.

The top 10 percent — those making more than $110,000 — received 48 percent of total income, leaving 52 percent for the bottom 90 percent. Where are college-educated workers? Their median pay has basically stagnated for the past 10 years, at roughly $72,000 a year for men and $52,000 a year for women.

A big reason for the huge gains at the top is the outsize pay of executives, bankers and traders. Lower on the income ladder, workers have not fared well, in part because health care has consumed an ever-larger share of compensation and bargaining power has diminished with the decline in labor unions.

College is still the path to higher-paying professions. But without a concerted effort to develop new industries, the weakened economy will be hard pressed to create enough better-paid positions to absorb all graduates.

And to combat inequality, the drive for more college and more jobs must coincide with efforts to preserve and improve the policies, programs and institutions that have fostered shared prosperity and broad opportunity — Social Security, Medicare, public schools, progressive taxation, unions, affirmative action, regulation of financial markets and enforcement of labor laws.

College is not a cure-all, but it will certainly take the best and brightest minds to confront those challenges.

    College, Jobs and Inequality, NYT, 13.15.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/opinion/14tue1.html

Promoting Learning, or Dependence?

November 21, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “More Professors Give Out Hand-Held Devices to Monitor Students and Engage Them” (“The Choice,” news article, Nov. 16):

I read your article with dismay. The devices mentioned in the article that require students to give feedback to the professor every 15 minutes (to make sure that the students are not sleeping or doing social networking) follow a trend that encourages students to become increasingly dependent. These students are not being taught the value of self-motivation and responsibility; they are being prompted to respond.

As one student said: “I actually kind of like it. It does make you read. It makes you pay attention. It reinforces what you are supposed to be doing as a student.” Isn’t it sad that this student needs a clicker to make sure that she does what she is supposed to be doing as a student? When she graduates, I suppose that her future employers will need to distribute clickers to make sure that she does what she is supposed to be doing as an employee.

In my courses I expect that students are young adults committed to learning and that they will accept responsibility for their success or their failure. I consider this approach part of my duty to help prepare them for life as independent, self-motivated members of society.

Gustavo Pellón
Charlottesville, Va., Nov. 16, 2010

The writer is an associate professor of Spanish and comparative literature at the University of Virginia.

•

To the Editor:

The effectiveness of clickers to promote learning is based on the principle of active response immediately followed by knowledge of results. It is an upgraded variation of what teachers in K-12 have used since schools began.

The only caveat is that the clickers provide students with practice that is appropriate for the goals teachers want to achieve. It’s easy to equate swift and correct responses with deeper understanding. That’s why it’s risky to assume that teachers can be judged strictly on the basis of observations.

Walt Gardner
Los Angeles, Nov. 16, 2010

The writer’s Reality Check blog is published in Education Week.

•

To the Editor:

Use of handheld devices to pose questions during class is not strictly an undergraduate trend. Many lecturers at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons (and I assume other grad schools as well) enlist the devices not only to stimulate critical thinking but also to encourage collaboration with classmates.

Thus if used correctly, this technology may be interactive in the true sense of the word. It plants the seeds for the interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving that epitomizes modern medicine and other professional fields today.

Geoff Rubin
New York, Nov. 16, 2010

The writer is a third-year medical student at Columbia.

•

To the Editor:

Your article about hand-held “clickers” being used in college classrooms across the country to take attendance, increase student participation, monitor student understanding, facilitate brief quizzes and generally enhance learning appeared after a Nov. 5 front-page article described classes on the Web at the University of Florida and a number of other large universities as these institutions struggle to respond simultaneously to shrinking budgets and growing enrollments (“Still in Dorm, Because Class Is on the Web”).

There may be a painful inconsistency between “serving” as many students as possible and teaching them effectively. It is not hard to imagine that the clicker-equipped students will be learning more, maybe much more, than their peers who watch a computer monitor still clad in their pajamas. In the future, what will “college graduate” mean?

James W. Davis
Clayton, Mo., Nov. 16, 2010

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at Washington University in St. Louis.

    Promoting Learning, or Dependence?, NYT, 21.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/opinion/l22clicker.html

More Professors Give Out Hand-Held Devices to Monitor Students and Engage Them

November 15, 2010
The New York Times
By JACQUES STEINBERG

EVANSTON, Ill. — If any of the 70 undergraduates in Prof. Bill White’s “Organizational Behavior” course here at Northwestern University are late for class, or not paying attention, he will know without having to scan the lecture hall.

Their “clickers” will tell him.

Every student in Mr. White’s class has been assigned a palm-size, wireless device that looks like a TV remote but has a far less entertaining purpose. With their clickers in hand, the students in Mr. White’s class automatically clock in as “present” as they walk into class.

They then use the numbered buttons on the devices to answer multiple-choice quizzes that count for nearly 20 percent of their grade, and that always begin precisely one minute into class. Later, with a click, they can signal to their teacher without raising a hand that they are confused by the day’s lesson.

But the greatest impact of such devices — which more than a half-million students are using this fall on several thousand college campuses — may be cultural: they have altered, perhaps irrevocably, the nap schedules of anyone who might have hoped to catch a few winks in the back row, and made it harder for them to respond to text messages, e-mail and other distractions.

In Professor White’s 90-minute class, as in similar classes at Harvard, the University of Arizona and Vanderbilt, barely 15 minutes pass without his asking students to “grab your clickers” to provide feedback

Though some Northwestern students say they resent the potential Big Brother aspect of all this, Jasmine Morris, a senior majoring in industrial engineering, is not one of them.

“I actually kind of like it,” Ms. Morris said after a class last week. “It does make you read. It makes you pay attention. It reinforces what you’re supposed to be doing as a student.”

Inevitably, some students have been tempted to see clickers as “cat and mouse” game pieces. Noshir Contractor, who teaches a class on social networking to Northwestern undergraduates, said he began using clickers in spring 2008 — and, not long after, watched a student array perhaps five of the devices in front of him.

The owners had skipped class, but their clickers had made it.

Professor Contractor said he tipped his cap to the students’ creativity — this was, after all, a class on social networking — but then reminded them that there “are other ways to count attendance,” and that, by the way, they were all signatories to the school’s honor principle. The practice stopped, he said.

Though the technology is relatively new, preliminary studies at Harvard and Ohio State, among other institutions, suggest that engaging students in class through a device as familiar to them as a cellphone — there are even applications that convert iPads and BlackBerrys into class-ready clickers — increases their understanding of material that may otherwise be conveyed in traditional lectures.

The clickers are also gaining wide use in middle and high schools, as well as at corporate gatherings. Whatever the setting, audience responses are received on a computer at the front of the room and instantly translated into colorful bar graphs displayed on a giant monitor.

The remotes used at Northwestern were made by Turning Technologies, a company in Youngstown, Ohio, and are compatible with PowerPoint. Depending on the model, the hand-helds can sell for $30 to $70 each. Some colleges require students to buy them; others lend them to students.

Tina Rooks, the chief instructional officer for Turning Technologies, said the company expected to ship over one million clickers this year, with roughly half destined for about 2,500 university campuses, including community colleges and for-profit institutions. The company said its higher-education sales had grown 60 percent since 2008, and 95 percent since 2006.

At Northwestern, more than three dozen professors now use clickers in their classrooms. Professor White, who teaches industrial engineering, was among the first here to adopt them about six years ago.

He smiled knowingly when asked about some students’ professed dislike of the clickers.

“They should walk in with them in their hands, on time, ready to go,” he said.

Professor White acknowledged, though, that the clickers were hardly a silver bullet for engaging students, and that they were just one of many tools he employed, including video clips, guest speakers and calling on individual students to share their thoughts.

“Everyone learns differently,” he said. “Some learn watching stuff. Some learn by listening. Some learn by reading. I try to mix it all into every class.”

Many of Professor White’s students said the highlight of his class was often the display of results of a survey-via-clicker, when they could see whether their classmates shared their opinions. They also said that they appreciated the anonymity, and that while the professor might know how they responded, their peers would not.

Last week, for example, he flashed a photo of the university president, Morton Schapiro, onto the screen, along with a question, “Source of power?” followed by these possible answers:

¶“1. Coercive power” (sometimes punitive).

¶“2. Reward power.”

¶“3. Legitimate power” (typically by virtue of one’s office).

¶“4. Expert power” (more typically applied to someone like an electrician or a mechanic).

¶ 5. Referent power” (usually tied to how the leader is viewed personally).

To Professor White’s seeming relief, a clear majority, 71 percent, chose No. 3, a sign that they considered his ultimate boss to be “legitimate.”

And then, to his delight, the students emerged from their electronic veils to register their opinions the old-fashioned way.

“They can be very reluctant to speak when they think they’re in the minority,” he said. “Once they see they’re not the only ones, they speak up more.”

    More Professors Give Out Hand-Held Devices to Monitor Students and Engage Them, NYT, 15.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/education/16clickers.html

In School Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda

November 6, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

HELENA, Mont. — Alarmed by evidence that gay and lesbian students are common victims of schoolyard bullies, many school districts are bolstering their antiharassment rules with early lessons in tolerance, explaining that some children have “two moms” or will grow up to love members of the same sex.

But such efforts to teach acceptance of homosexuality, which have gained urgency after several well-publicized suicides by gay teenagers, are provoking new culture wars in some communities.

Many educators and rights advocates say that official prohibitions of slurs and taunts are most effective when combined with frank discussions, from kindergarten on, about diverse families and sexuality.

Angry parents and religious critics, while agreeing that schoolyard harassment should be stopped, charge that liberals and gay rights groups are using the antibullying banner to pursue a hidden “homosexual agenda,” implicitly endorsing, for example, same-sex marriage.

Last summer, school officials here in Montana’s capital unveiled new guidelines for teaching about sexuality and tolerance. They proposed teaching first graders that “human beings can love people of the same gender,” and fifth graders that sexual intercourse can involve “vaginal, oral or anal penetration.”

A local pastor, Rick DeMato, carried his shock straight to the pulpit.

“We do not want the minds of our children to be polluted with the things of a carnal-minded society,” Mr. DeMato, 69, told his flock at Liberty Baptist Church.

In tense community hearings, some parents made familiar arguments that innocent youngsters were not ready for explicit language. Other parents and pastors, along with leaders of the Big Sky Tea Party, saw a darker purpose.

“Anyone who reads this document can see that it promotes acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle,” one mother said at a six-hour school board meeting in late September.

Barely heard was the plea of Harlan Reidmohr, 18, who graduated last spring and said he was relentlessly tormented and slammed against lockers after coming out during his freshman year. Through his years in the Helena schools, he said at another school board meeting, sexual orientation was never once discussed in the classroom, and “I believe this led to a lot of the sexual harassment I faced.”

Last month, the federal Department of Education told schools they were obligated, under civil rights laws, to try to prevent harassment, including that based on sexual orientation and gender identity. But the agency did not address the controversy over more explicit classroom materials in grade schools.

Some districts, especially in larger cities, have adopted tolerance lessons with minimal dissent. But in suburban districts in California, Illinois and Minnesota, as well as here in Helena, the programs have unleashed fierce opposition.

“Of course we’re all against bullying,” Mr. DeMato, one of numerous pastors who opposed the plan, said in an interview. “But the Bible says very clearly that homosexuality is wrong, and Christians don’t want the schools to teach subjects that are repulsive to their values.”

The divided Helena school board, after four months of turmoil, recently adopted a revised plan for teaching about health, sex and diversity. Much of the explicit language about sexuality and gay families was removed or replaced with vague phrases, like a call for young children to “understand that family structures differ.” The superintendent who has ardently pushed the new curriculum, Bruce K. Messinger, agreed to let parents remove their children from lessons they find objectionable.

In Alameda, Calif., officials started to introduce new tolerance lessons after teachers noticed grade-schoolers using gay slurs and teasing children with gay or lesbian parents. A group of parents went to court seeking the right to remove their children from lessons that included reading “And Tango Makes Three,” a book in which two male penguins bond and raise a child.

The parents lost the suit, and the school superintendent, Kirsten Vital, said the district was not giving ground. “Everyone in our community needs to feel safe and visible and included,” Ms. Vital said.

Some of the Alameda parents have taken their children out of public schools, while others now hope to unseat members of the school board.

After at least two suicides by gay students last year, a Minnesota school district recently clarified its antibullying rules to explicitly protect gay and lesbian students along with other target groups. But to placate religious conservatives, the district, Anoka-Hennepin County, also stated that teachers must be absolutely neutral on questions of sexual orientation and refrain from endorsing gay parenting.

Rights advocates worry that teachers will avoid any discussion of gay-related topics, missing a chance to fight prejudice.

While nearly all states require schools to have rules against harassment, only 10 require them to explicitly outlaw bullying related to sexual orientation. Rights groups including the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, based in New York, are promoting a federal “safe schools” act to make this a universal requirement, although passage is not likely any time soon.

Candi Cushman, an educational analyst with Focus on the Family, a Christian group, said that early lessons about sexuality and gay parents reflected a political agenda, including legitimizing same-sex marriage. “We need to protect all children from bullying,” Ms. Cushman said. “But the advocacy groups are promoting homosexual lessons in the name of antibullying.”

Ellen Kahn of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, which offers a “welcoming schools” curriculum for grade schools, denied such motives.

“When you talk about two moms or two dads, the idea is to validate the families, not to push a debate about gay marriage,” Ms. Kahn said. The program involves what she described as age-appropriate materials on family and sexual diversity and is used in dozens of districts, though it has sometime stirred dissent.

The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, which runs teacher-training programs and recommends videos and books depicting gay parents in a positive light, has met opposition in several districts, including the Chicago suburb of Oak Park.

Julie Justicz, a 47-year-old lawyer, and her partner live in Oak Park with two sons ages 6 and 11. Ms. Justicz saw the need for early tolerance training, she said, when their older son was upset by pejorative terms about gays in the schoolyard.

Frank classroom discussions about diverse families and hurtful phrases had greatly reduced the problem, she said.

But one of the objecting parents, Tammi Shulz, who describes herself as a traditional Christian, said, “I just don’t think it’s great to talk about homosexuality with 5-year-olds.”

Tess Dufrechou, president of Helena High School’s Gay-Straight Alliance, a club that promotes tolerance, counters that, “By the time kids get to high school, it’s too late.”

Only a handful of students in Helena high schools are openly gay, with others keeping the secret because they fear the reactions of parents and peers, students said.

Michael Gengler, one of the few to have come out, said, “You learn from an early age that it’s not acceptable to be gay,” adding that he was disappointed that the teaching guidelines had been watered down.

But Mr. Messinger, the superintendent, said he still hoped to achieve the original goals without using the explicit language that offended many parents.

“This is not about advocating a lifestyle, but making sure our children understand it and, I hope, accept it,” he said.

    In School Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda, NYT, 6.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07bully.html

Learning in Dorm, Because Class Is on the Web

November 4, 2010
The New York Times
By TRIP GABRIEL

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Like most other undergraduates, Anish Patel likes to sleep in. Even though his Principles of Microeconomics class at 9:35 a.m. is just a five-minute stroll from his dorm, he would rather flip open his laptop in his room to watch the lecture, streamed live over the campus network.

On a recent morning, as Mr. Patel’s two roommates slept with covers pulled tightly over their heads, he sat at his desk taking notes on Prof. Mark Rush’s explanation of the term “perfect competition.” A camera zoomed in for a close-up of the blackboard, where Dr. Rush scribbled in chalk, “lots of firms and lots of buyers.”

The curtains were drawn in the dorm room. The floor was awash in the flotsam of three freshmen — clothes, backpacks, homework, packages of Chips Ahoy and Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries.

The University of Florida broadcasts and archives Dr. Rush’s lectures less for the convenience of sleepy students like Mr. Patel than for a simple principle of economics: 1,500 undergraduates are enrolled and no lecture hall could possibly hold them.

Dozens of popular courses in psychology, statistics, biology and other fields are also offered primarily online. Students on this scenic campus of stately oaks rarely meet classmates in these courses.

Online education is best known for serving older, nontraditional students who can not travel to colleges because of jobs and family. But the same technologies of “distance learning” are now finding their way onto brick-and-mortar campuses, especially public institutions hit hard by declining state funds. At the University of Florida, for example, resident students are earning 12 percent of their credit hours online this semester, a figure expected to grow to 25 percent in five years.

This may delight undergraduates who do not have to change out of pajamas to “attend” class. But it also raises questions that go to the core of a college’s mission: Is it possible to learn as much when your professor is a mass of pixels whom you never meet? How much of a student’s education and growth — academic and personal — depends on face-to-face contact with instructors and fellow students?

“When I look back, I think it took away from my freshman year,” said Kaitlyn Hartsock, a senior psychology major at Florida who was assigned to two online classes during her first semester in Gainesville. “My mom was really upset about it. She felt like she’s paying for me to go to college and not sit at home and watch through a computer.”

Across the country, online education is exploding: 4.6 million students took a college-level online course during fall 2008, up 17 percent from a year earlier, according to the Sloan Survey of Online Learning. A large majority — about three million — were simultaneously enrolled in face-to-face courses, belying the popular notion that most online students live far from campuses, said Jeff Seaman, co-director of the survey. Many are in community colleges, he said. Very few attend private colleges; families paying $53,000 a year demand low student-faculty ratios.

Colleges and universities that have plunged into the online field, mostly public, cite their dual missions to serve as many students as possible while remaining affordable, as well as a desire to exploit the latest technologies.

At the University of Iowa, as many as 10 percent of 14,000 liberal arts undergraduates take an online course each semester, including Classical Mythology and Introduction to American Politics.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, first-year Spanish students are no longer offered a face-to-face class; the university moved all instruction online, despite internal research showing that online students do slightly less well in grammar and speaking.

“You have X amount of money, what are you going to do with it?” said Larry King, chairman of the Romance languages department, where budget cuts have forced difficult choices. “You can’t be all things to all people.”

The University of Florida has faced sweeping budget cuts from the State Legislature totaling 25 percent over three years. That is a main reason the university is moving aggressively to offer more online instruction. “We see this as the future of higher education,” said Joe Glover, the university provost.

“Quite honestly, the higher education industry in the United States has not been tremendously effective in the face-to-face mode if you look at national graduation rates,” he added. “At the very least we should be experimenting with other modes of delivery of education.”

A sampling of Florida professors teaching online found both enthusiasm and doubts. “I would prefer to teach classes of 50 and know every student’s name, but that’s not where we are financially and space-wise,” said Megan Mocko, who teaches statistics to 1,650 students. She said an advantage of the Internet is that students can stop the lecture and rewind when they do not understand something.

Ilan Shrira, who teaches developmental psychology to 300, said that he chose his field because of the passion of a professor who taught him as an undergraduate. But he thought it unlikely that anyone could be so inspired by an online course.

Kristin Joos built interactivity into her Principles of Sociology course to keep students engaged. There are small-group online discussions, and students join a virtual classroom once a week using a conferencing software called WiZiQ.

“Hi, everyone, welcome to Week 9. Hello!” Dr. Joos said in a peppy voice recently to about 60 students who had logged on. She sat at a desk in her home office; a live video feed she switched on at one point showed her in black librarian’s glasses and a tank top.

Ms. Hartsock, the senior psychology major, followed the class from her own off-campus home, her laptop open on the dining room table. As Dr. Joos lectured, a chat box scrolled with students’ comments and questions.

The topic was sexual identity, which Dr. Joos defined as “a determination made through the application of socially agreed-upon biological criteria for classifying persons as females and males.”

She asked students for their own definitions. One, bringing an online-chat sensibility to an academic discussion, typed: “If someone looks like a chick and wants to be called a chick even though they’re not, now they can be one.”

Ms. Hartsock, 23, diligently typed notes. A hard-working student who maintains an A average, she was frustrated by the online format. Other members of her discussion group were not pulling their weight, she said. The one test so far, online, required answering five questions in 10 minutes — a lightning round meant to prevent cheating by Googling answers.

In a conventional class, “I’m someone who sits toward the front and shares my thoughts with the teacher,” she said. In the 10 or so online courses she has taken in her four years, “it’s all the same,” she said. “No comments. No feedback. And the grades are always late.”

As her attention wandered, she got up to microwave some leftover rice.

    Learning in Dorm, Because Class Is on the Web, NYT, 4.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/us/05college.html

48th Is Not a Good Place

October 26, 2010
The New York Times

The National Academies, the country’s leading advisory group on science and technology, warned in 2005 that unless the United States improved the quality of math and science education, at all levels, it would continue to lose economic ground to foreign competitors.

The situation remains grim. According to a follow-up report published last month, the academies found that the United States ranks 27th out of 29 wealthy countries in the proportion of college students with degrees in science or engineering, while the World Economic Forum ranked this country 48th out of 133 developed and developing nations in quality of math and science instruction.

More than half the patents awarded here last year were given to companies from outside the United States. In American graduate schools, nearly half of students studying the sciences are foreigners; while these students might once have spent their careers here, many are now opting to return home.

In a 2009 survey, nearly a third of this country’s manufacturing companies reported having trouble finding enough skilled workers.

The academies call on federal and state governments to improve early childhood education, strengthen the public school math and science curriculum, and improve teacher training in these crucial subjects. It calls on government and colleges to provide more financial and campus support to students who excel at science.

The report sets a goal of increasing the percentage of people with undergraduate degrees in science from 6 percent to 10 percent. It calls for the country to quickly double the number of minority students who hold science degrees — to 160,000 from about 80,000.

Too often, science curriculums are grinding and unimaginative, which may help explain why more than half of all college science majors quit the discipline before they earn their degrees. The science establishment has long viewed a high abandonment rate as part of a natural winnowing.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County — one of the leading producers of African-American research scientists in the country — rejects that view. It has shown that science and engineering students thrive when they are given mentors and early exposure to exciting, cutting-edge laboratory science. Other colleges are now trying to emulate the program.

Congress has an important role to play. It can start by embracing the academies’ call to attract as many as 10,000 qualified math and science teachers annually to the profession. One sound way to do that — while also increasing the number of minority scientists — is to expand funding for programs that support high-caliber math and science students in college in return for their commitment to teach in needy districts.

    48th Is Not a Good Place, NYT? 26.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/opinion/26tue2.html

Our Choice: How to Save the Schools

October 16, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Grading School Choice,” by Ross Douthat (column, Oct. 11), about “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” a new documentary film:

This is not a movie about public education, as Mr. Douthat and other commentators seem to believe. It is a movie about families and children who care about education.

This, in turn, raises the questions that have derailed every school reform plan yet devised: How, exactly, does “school choice” help the girl whose single mother is too caught up in alcohol and drugs to sign up for a lottery? How does giving a voucher to the father who sexually abuses his young son make a difference in that child’s life?

A Times article last spring said that, according to a 2008 report from the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, about 140,000 teenagers “were missing a month or more of classes each year by the time they reached high school.”

If your mother’s or father’s idea of “school choice” is to let you stay home whenever you choose, then grading teachers is not going to be a cure.

John J. Viall
Cincinnati, Oct. 11, 2010

The writer is a retired public school teacher.

•

To the Editor:

Choice does not make better schools; parental involvement does.

Public schools all over San Francisco have been turning around because parents cannot afford the $20,000 tuition for private schools and instead are becoming involved in their local public schools.

But even in these success stories, subjects like art, music and physical education are often taught by the regular classroom teacher or “independent contractors” who make weekly visits. Middle-class parents supplement with after-school enrichment, like music lessons, sports teams, art classes and tutoring.

But many of the lowest-performing schools cannot rely on parental involvement. These schools need to provide after-school homework help, art, music, sports and in some cases health services like dental and medical visits. The students need to learn the discipline of doing homework, but also the joy of education through art, music and sports.

We have all heard for many years now, “Read to your children.” But for many children, this simple act never occurs.

Catherine Palmer
San Francisco, Oct. 11, 2010

•

To the Editor:

I wait patiently for someone to explain this: Why is Ross Douthat (and most of the right wing in this country) so sure that “monopoly breeds mediocrity” and competition is the answer to improving public schools?

The best educational systems in the world, such as those in Finland, Japan and South Korea, are pure public “monopolies.”

Max Page
Amherst, Mass., Oct. 11, 2010

The writer is a professor of architecture and history at the University of Massachusetts and a member of the executive committee of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.

•

To the Editor:

Ross Douthat argues that increasing competition in education through a free-market ideology will improve schools. But any teacher who sees money as an incentive to improving the quality of instruction should not be teaching.

Merit pay, charter schools and vouchers are all based on the same mistaken assumption that a free-market ideology will raise academic standards. The motivation behind good teaching is intrinsic. It is a profession that does not readily lend itself to market forces.

The real problem with the academic reform dialogue is that too few teachers are included.

Larry Hoffner
New York, Oct. 11, 2010

The writer is a high school teacher.

•

To the Editor:

Ross Douthat says that there are high-achieving charter schools like those in KIPP and the Harlem Children’s Zone, but that many other charter schools are not high-achieving. Yet the same is true of public, private and parochial schools.

The question of how to shape school structure is a political and sadly circular debate that allows children to get lost.

Every ineffective school is a problem, and within every successful school we can seek solutions that can be replicated. The issue should not be about “grading school choice,” but about making certain that we maximize the opportunities for each child.

Shelly Beaser
Bala Cynwyd, Pa., Oct. 11, 2010

The writer is a teacher and is on the board of KIPP Philadelphia.

    Our Choice: How to Save the Schools, NYT, 16.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/opinion/l17douthat.html

Grading School Choice

October 10, 2010
The New York Times
By ROSS DOUTHAT

In this fall’s must-see documentary, “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” Davis Guggenheim offers a critique of America’s public school bureaucracy that’s manipulative, simplistic and more than a little bit utopian.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Guggenheim’s cause, the plight of children trapped in failing schools with lousy, union-protected teachers, is important enough to make his overzealousness forgivable. And his prescription — more accountability for teachers and bureaucrats, and more choices for parents and kids — deserves all the support his film promises to win for it.

But if propaganda has its virtues, it also has its limits. Guggenheim’s movie, which follows five families through the brutal charter school lotteries that determine whether their kids will escape from public “dropout factories,” stirs an entirely justified outrage at the system’s unfairnesses and cruelties. This outrage needs to be supplemented, though, with a dose of realism about what education reformers can reasonably hope to accomplish, and what real choice and competition would ultimately involve.

With that in mind, I have a modest proposal: Copies of Frederick Hess’s recent National Affairs essay, “Does School Choice ‘Work’?” should be handed out at every “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” showing, as a sober-minded complement to Guggenheim’s cinematic call to arms.

An education scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Hess supports just about every imaginable path to increasing competition in education: charter schools, merit pay for teachers, vouchers, even for-profit academies.

But he also recognizes that partisans of school choice tend to wildly overpromise — implying that their favored policies could swiftly Lake Wobegonize America, and make every school and student above average. (This is a trap, alas, that “Waiting for ‘Superman’” falls into as well.)

Overpromising leads inevitably to disappointment. When it comes to raising test scores, the grail of most reformers, school choice’s record is still ambiguous. For every charter school success story like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the KIPP network — both touted in Guggenheim’s documentary — there’s a charter school where scores are worse than the public school status quo. The same is true for vouchers and merit pay: the jury is still out on whether either policy consistently raises academic performance.

This doesn’t mean that school choice doesn’t work, Hess argues. It just means that the benefits are often more modest and incremental than many reformers want to think. They can be measured in money saved (both charter and private schools usually spend much less per pupil than their public competitors), in improved graduation rates, and in higher parental and student satisfaction. But they don’t always show up in test scores.

This insight leads to Hess’s second argument — that if reformers want to see more than modest academic improvements, they need to set more ambitious goals. The theory of school choice is the theory of the free market: monopoly breeds mediocrity, and more competition should make all the competitors improve. But in practice, even the more ambitious school choice experiments have protected the public school system from the rigors of real competition.

When poor-performing public schools lose students to charters or private-school competitors, Hess points out, there are rarely any consequences. In Milwaukee, for instance, where a high-profile voucher program has been in place since 1990, public school enrollment has dropped as families have taken vouchers and fled the public system. But spending on public schools has gone steadily upward, effectively rewarding bureaucrats for their failure to keep parents and students happy. As Hess writes, “This is choice without consequences — competition as soft political slogan rather than hard economic reality.”

A real marketplace in education, he suggests, probably wouldn’t fund schools directly at all. It would only fund students, tying a school’s budget to the number of children seeking to enroll. If there are 150 applicants for a charter school, they should all bring their funding with them — and take it away from the failing schools they’re trying to escape.

This is a radical idea, guaranteed to meet intense resistance from just about every educational interest group. But Hess makes a compelling case that it needs to be the school choice movement’s long-term goal, if reformers hope to do more than just tinker around the edges of the system.

In the shorter term, meanwhile, he suggests that school choice advocates need to make a case for greater competition that doesn’t depend on test scores alone. Maybe charter schools, merit pay and vouchers won’t instantly turn every American child into a test-acing dynamo. But if they “only” create a more cost-effective system that makes parents and students happier with their schools — well, that would be no small feat, and well worth fighting for.

    Grading School Choice, NYT, 10.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/opinion/11douthat.html

The Face of Private-School Growth, Familiar-Looking but Profit-Making

September 21, 2010
The New York Times
By JENNY ANDERSON

The British International School of New York offers spacious waterfront classrooms, small computers encased in rubber for small people who tend to drop them, and a pool for the once-a-week swimming classes required for all students.

But there is nothing within its halls or on its Web site that indicates what differentiates British International from the teeming masses of expensive private schools in New York: It is run for profit.

It is one of a small number of large for-profit schools that have opened recently or plan to open in New York City next year. While they are a speck on the city’s private-school landscape, for-profit schools are practically the only significant primary and secondary institutions to have started up in the last decade, and may represent the future of private-school growth.

Parents and consultants have begun to take notice, and the Independent School Admission Association of Greater New York, the umbrella group for the city’s elite private schools, is contemplating withdrawing its requirement that members be nonprofit, two association members said.

James Williams, executive director of the National Independent Private School Association, whose members are for-profit schools, said that although private-school enrollment nationally had fallen because of the recession, he had seen a small upswing in applications for accreditation from for-profit schools, with significant growth in schools for children with special needs.

Parents may be hard-pressed to see much difference between for-profit and nonprofit independent schools. Both cost a lot, both depend on the children of wealthy people to attend, both pay their headmasters large salaries.

But nonprofit schools enjoy generous tax advantages, including low-cost benefit packages, property-tax exemptions and grant eligibility. They also must bridge the gap between tuition revenue and the expense of running the institution with donations, no surprise to parents who face frequent solicitations for pricey galas and the ever-needy annual fund. For-profit schools pay taxes but generally refrain from soliciting parents, instead securing money from investors who hope to make money later, if the school is sold or the company that owns it goes public.

It remains unclear how profitable a for-profit school can be, especially since private corporations are not required to disclose their financial information. But the market for private-school enrollment generally seems robust: according to one study conducted for a new school, the number of school-age children in households between Battery Park City and 72nd Street with annual incomes above $500,000 soared to 15,700 in 2010, from 4,300 a decade before. According to the study, the top dozen schools in the city — all nonprofit — have only 11,000 seats.

With real estate acquisition and construction so expensive in New York — estimates range from $50 million to $100 million to build a top-flight school for multiple grades — starting a school requires either a huge donation or significant venture capital.

All the leaders of new for-profit schools believe there is money to be made — efficiencies to be exploited, though they are loath to say as much — in running a school in a city where parents go to extreme measures to secure their children space in elite schools that charge more than $35,000 for kindergarten. But those leaders are also conscious that the notion of profiting from the noble aspirations of educating children can seem a little unsavory, especially in light of recent scandals involving for-profit colleges and commercial companies managing public charter schools.

“I don’t think for-profits or not-for-profits have a corner on educational efficacy,” said Christopher Whittle, who in 1991 founded the Edison Project, a plan to open up to 1,000 technologically advanced for-profit schools that would operate more efficiently than public schools He is now focused on creating Avenues: the World School, a for-profit school scheduled to open on the West Side of Manhattan next year. “They’re both capable of really good things and less than great things. The main difference is their capital source.”

Susan Wolford of BMO Capital Markets, a boutique investment bank, said that for-profit schools had profit margins of 20 to 25 percent, before taxes and interest on debt and amortization.

The key revenue drivers are tuition and enrollment. While competition is fierce for admission to the brand-name schools, it remains to be seen if newcomers will be able to lure the same crowds. “Parents like schools with a long history and reputation of excellence,” said Victoria Goldman, author of “The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools and Selective Public Schools.” “Certainly if they pay $30,000 to $35,000, they want tried-and-true.”

But owners of for-profit schools say they will have more freedom to experiment without a backlash from parents, teachers, administrators and alumni.

“There’s a can-do attitude here,” said William T. Phelps, the new headmaster of the British International School. “If I say, ‘Can you try this out,’ 95 percent of the time the answer is ‘Yes.’ In established schools, you try to move a painting and there’s a backlash.”

Some of the city’s for-profit schools have been around for decades, including the Dwight School, York Preparatory School and the Mandell School.One of the newcomers, Claremont Preparatory, is part of a company called MetSchools, which owns 10 schools and preschools in New York City. Among them are for-profit and nonprofit schools, including the Rebecca School and the Aaron School, which cater to children with developmental disabilities and rely heavily on government money.

Claremont’s experience is a study in contradictions. It was founded in 2005 with 54 students. This year, 575 children will stretch out over the school’s 325,000 square feet. (It has a pool and a banquet hall, which can be rented for parties.)

But the school has had three headmasters in five years and was sued last year by a former school psychologist who said she was fired for reporting to child welfare authorities that a student had said his mother had hit him.

In its response to the suit, Claremont denied the psychologist’s accusations and said she had breached her contract and failed to use her training to properly evaluate the situation. Lawyers on both sides did not return several calls for comment.

In June, Claremont’s founder, Michael Koffler, abruptly announced that the headmaster would be leaving, angering parents who had already put down deposits for the fall. And while enrollment has grown, it is nowhere near the school’s onetime goal of 1,000 students by 2007. Mr. Koffler declined to comment; a spokeswoman said he was too busy with the start of the school year.

To attract students, the new schools often try to offer something special. Claremont, which has little competition in its Wall Street neighborhood, has its modern, spacious campus. The Avenues school intends to let students transfer seamlessly among its planned 20 schools in major cities around the world — if, for example, their parents’ high-salary jobs require them to move abroad.

The World Class Learning Academy, in the East Village, another for-profit venture, will use the patented International Primary Curriculum, which it says is used in 1,000 schools worldwide (5 in the United States). Originally scheduled to open in 2011, World Class announced this spring that it would instead start in September, only to back away from the decision soon afterward, citing construction issues and the fact that it had enrolled only a small number of children.

Initial plans for Avenues give a sense of where for-profit schools might try to find savings: class size will be roughly the same as at top Manhattan schools, but there will be fewer teachers, and they will be expected to spend a larger percentage of their day in the classroom. One person involved in the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity since the plans were still fluid, said the school also planned to pay the teachers more than the notoriously low salaries of private-school teachers.

And administrators of for-profit schools are eager to highlight that they do not go hat-in-hand to parents every few months. “Those donations come with strings and baggage,” said Gabriella Rowe, head of the Mandell School.

Andrea Greystoke, the British International School founder, who has six children of her own, said, “After paying six lots of school fees, I have a great antipathy for fund-raising.”

Not so at Claremont. It has a separate nonprofit parents’ association, which Mr. Koffler said in an interview earlier this year had raised $250,000 for financial aid last year, about 10 percent of the $2.5 million in aid that the school provided students.

But such arrangements could raise concerns about whether tax-deductible donations are being used to support a for-profit enterprise. Roger Colinvaux, a law professor at Catholic University in Washington who worked for the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, asked, “Is the not-for-profit primarily helping the student get an education or primarily helping the for-profit get tuition?”

    The Face of Private-School Growth, Familiar-Looking but Profit-Making, NYT, 21.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/nyregion/22private.html

Learning by Playing: Video Games in the Classroom

September 15, 2010
The New York Times
By SARA CORBETT

One morning last winter I watched a middle-school teacher named Al Doyle give a lesson, though not your typical lesson. This was New York City, a noncharter public school in an old building on a nondescript street near Gramercy Park, inside an ordinary room that looked a lot like all the other rooms around it, with fluorescent lights and linoleum floors and steam-driven radiators that hissed and clanked endlessly.

Doyle was, at 54, a veteran teacher and had logged 32 years in schools all over Manhattan, where he primarily taught art and computer graphics. In the school, which was called Quest to Learn, he was teaching a class, Sports for the Mind, which every student attended three times a week. It was described in a jargony flourish on the school’s Web site as “a primary space of practice attuned to new media literacies, which are multimodal and multicultural, operating as they do within specific contexts for specific purposes.” What it was, really, was a class in technology and game design.

The lesson that day was on enemy movement, and the enemy was a dastardly collection of spiky-headed robots roving inside a computer game. The students — a pack of about 20 boisterous sixth graders — were meant to observe how the robots moved, then chart any patterns they saw on pieces of graph paper. Later in the class period, working on laptops, they would design their own games. For the moment, though, they were spectators.

Doyle, who is thin and gray-haired with a neatly trimmed goatee, sat at a desk in the center of the room, his eyeglasses perched low on his nose, his fingers frenetically tapping the keyboard of a MacBook. The laptop was connected to a wall-mounted interactive whiteboard, giving the students who were sprawled on the floor in front of it an excellent view of his computer screen. Which was a good thing, because at least as they saw it, Doyle was going to die an embarrassing death without their help. Doyle had 60 seconds to steer a little bubble-shaped sprite — a toddling avatar dressed in a royal blue cape and matching helmet — through a two-dimensional maze without bumping into the proliferating robots. In order to win, he would need to gobble up some number of yellow reward points, Pac-Man style.

“Go right! Go right! Go right!” the students were shouting. “Now down, down, down, downdowndown!” A few had lifted themselves onto their knees and were pounding invisible keyboards in front of them. “Whoa!” they yelled in unison, some of them instinctively ducking as Doyle’s sprite narrowly avoided a patrolling enemy.

Beauchamp, a round-faced boy wearing a dark sweatshirt, watched Doyle backtrack to snap up more points and calmly offered a piece of advice. “That extra movement cost you some precious time, Al,” he said, sounding almost professorial. “There are more points up there than what you need to finish.”

“How much time do I have?” Doyle asked.

“Nineteen seconds.”

“Thanks,” said Doyle, his eyes not leaving the screen. He added, “See, us older people, we don’t have the peripheral vision to check the time because we didn’t grow up with these games.”

For a few seconds, it was quiet. Doyle pinged through a row of reward points and then, hitting a little cul-de-sac in the maze, he paused. His avatar’s tiny yellow feet pedaled uselessly against a wall. The students began to yowl. A girl named Shianne pressed her hand to her forehead in faux anguish.

“Go! Go! Turn around. Don’t slow down. What are you waiting for?” someone called out.

“How much time do I have left?”

“Thirteen seconds!”

Doyle smiled. “All the time in the world,” he said, before taking his sprite on a deliberate detour to get even more reward points. The move, like a premature touchdown dance, put his students in agony.

“To the goal! To the goal! Al, run to the goal!”

And as the clock wound down and the students hollered and the steam radiator in the corner let out another long hiss, Doyle’s little blue self rounded a final corner, waited out a passing robot and charged into the goal at the end of the maze with less than two seconds to spare. This caused a microriot in the classroom. Cheers erupted. Fists pumped. A few kids lay back on the floor as if knocked out by the drama. Several made notes on their graph paper. Doyle leaned back in his chair. Had he taught anything? Had they learned anything? It depended, really, on how you wanted to think about teaching and learning.

WHAT IF TEACHERS GAVE UP the vestiges of their educational past, threw away the worksheets, burned the canon and reconfigured the foundation upon which a century of learning has been built? What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child’s bedroom or even a child’s pocket, circa 2010 — if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology that fuels our world became the source and organizing principle of our children’s learning? What if, instead of seeing school the way we’ve known it, we saw it for what our children dreamed it might be: a big, delicious video game?

It is a radical proposition, sure. But during an era in which just about everything is downloadable and remixable, when children are frequently more digitally savvy than the adults around them, it’s perhaps not so crazy to think that schools — or at least one school, anyway — might try to remix our assumptions about how to reach and educate those children. What makes Quest to Learn unique is not so much that it has been loaded with laptops or even that it bills itself expressly as a home for “digital kids,” but rather that it is the brainchild of a professional game designer named Katie Salen. Salen, like many people interested in education, has spent a lot of time thinking about whether there is a way to make learning feel simultaneously more relevant to students and more connected to the world beyond school. And the answer, as she sees it, lies in games.

Quest to Learn is organized specifically around the idea that digital games are central to the lives of today’s children and also increasingly, as their speed and capability grow, powerful tools for intellectual exploration. Salen, a professor of design and technology at Parsons the New School for Design, also directs a research-based organization called Institute of Play, which examines the connections between games and learning. Working with Robert Torres, a learning scientist who is a former school principal, and a small team of curriculum and game designers, Salen spent two years planning Quest to Learn in conjunction with the education-reform group New Visions for Public Schools. Her work was financed by a research grant from the MacArthur Foundation, which is pouring $50 million into exploring the possibilities of digital media and learning in a variety of settings nationwide. The school was approved by New York City’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, as one of a handful of “demonstration sites” for innovative technology-based instructional methods and is part of a larger effort on the city’s part to create and experiment with new models for schools.

Quest to Learn is now beginning its second year, with about 145 sixth and seventh graders, all of whom were admitted by a districtwide lottery. (The intention is to add a grade level each year until it is a 6th-through-12th-grade school; Quest to Learn recently relocated to a larger but equally unmodern building in Chelsea.) Operating on a public-school budget but powered by additional grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, it is a well-financed and carefully watched educational experiment concerning children, video games and the thrumming, largely unexplored force field between them.

Salen and Torres are at the forefront of a small but increasingly influential group of education specialists who believe that going to school can and should be more like playing a game, which is to say it could be made more participatory, more immersive and also, well, fun. Nearly every aspect of life at Quest to Learn is thus designed to be gamelike, even when it doesn’t involve using a computer. Students don’t receive grades but rather achieve levels of expertise, denoted on their report cards as “pre-novice,” “novice,” “apprentice,” “senior” and “master.” They are enlisted to do things like defeat villains and lend a hand to struggling aliens, mostly by working in groups to overcome multifaceted challenges, all created by a collection of behind-the-scenes game designers. The principles are similar to those used in problem-based learning, a more established educational method in which students collaborate to tackle broad, open-ended problems, with a teacher providing guidance though not necessarily a lot of instruction. But at Quest to Learn, the problems have been expertly aerated with fantasy.

Once it has been worked over by game designers, a lesson doesn’t look like a lesson anymore. It is now a quest. And while students at the school are put through the usual rigors of studying pre-algebra, basic physics, ancient civilizations and writing, they do it inside interdisciplinary classes with names like Codeworlds — a hybrid of math and English class — where the quests blend skills from different subject areas. Students have been called upon to balance the budget and brainstorm business ideas for an imaginary community called Creepytown, for example, and to design architectural blueprints for a village of bumbling little creatures called the Troggles. There are elements of the school’s curriculum that look familiar — nightly independent reading assignments, weekly reading-comprehension packets and plenty of work with pencils and paper — and others that don’t. Quest to Learn students record podcasts, film and edit videos, play video games, blog avidly and occasionally receive video messages from aliens.

They also spend significant time building their own games. Sometimes they design board games using cardboard and markers and ungodly amounts of tape. Most of the time, though, they invent games for the computer. Salen’s theory goes like this: building a game — even the kind of simple game a sixth grader might build — is equivalent to building a miniworld, a dynamic system governed by a set of rules, complete with challenges, obstacles and goals. At its best, game design can be an interdisciplinary exercise involving math, writing, art, computer programming, deductive reasoning and critical thinking skills. If children can build, play and understand games that work, it’s possible that someday they will understand and design systems that work. And the world is full of complicated systems.

Does this educational approach actually work? And is it something that can, or should, find its way into schools in other parts of the country? As we fret about the perils of multitasking and digital distraction in adult life, the question arises: should a school provide practice with or relief from those things? It is still too early to say. But the introduction of Quest to Learn is tied to a continuing and sometimes heated national dialogue about what skills today’s learners most need to prepare them for success in a rapidly evolving, digitally mediated world. There is, at least, growing support for experimentation: in March, Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, released a draft National Educational Technology Plan that reads a bit like a manifesto for change, proposing among other things that the full force of technology be leveraged to meet “aggressive goals” and “grand” challenges, including increasing the percentage of the population that graduates from college to 60 percent from 39 percent in the next 10 years. What it takes to get there, the report suggests, is a “new kind of R.& D. for education” that encourages bold ideas and “high risk/high gain” endeavors — possibly even a school built around aliens, villains and video games.

SALEN IS 43, reddish-haired, hyperorganized and a quirky dresser. Some would consider her an unlikely prophet when it comes to education. Among Quest to Learn students, she is clearly beloved. Unlike most authority figures they know, she is a gifted player of Guitar Hero and has been spotted playing her Nintendo DSi on the subway. Until a few years ago she knew little about educational pedagogy and was instead immersed in doing things like converting an ice-cream truck into a mobile karaoke unit that traveled around San Jose, Calif., with a man dressed as a squirrel dispensing free frozen treats and encouraging city residents to pick up a microphone and belt out tunes. This was a community-building sort of game — or as Salen describes it, “an interactive play-based experience” — as was the race she helped design in Minneapolis and St. Paul, in which randomly organized groups of people carried 25-foot-high inflatable playing pieces modeled after those used in the board game Sorry through the streets of the cities.

A game, as Salen sees it, is really just a “designed experience,” in which a participant is motivated to achieve a goal while operating inside a prescribed system of boundaries and rules. In this way, school itself is one giant designed experience. It could be viewed, in fact, as the biggest and most important game any child will ever play. To this end, Quest to Learn has three full-time game designers supporting the work of the school’s 11 teachers — a ratio that reflects a trend more familiar to the business world, where designers and design-thinking have ascended to new and voguish heights.

Salen, like many designers, views things in terms of their ideal potential and also the physical space they occupy. She is thus less apt to refer to a school as “school” but rather as a “learning space” or a “discovery space” or sometimes as a “possibility space.” She and her colleagues are wrapped up in the idea that technology is doing for learning what it has done for pretty much every other aspect of living, which is to say that it has dismantled the walls between spaces. As anyone who has ever checked e-mail from a bathroom stall or browsed eBay from a chairlift can attest, what once occurred in just one space now happens in practically every space. This has revolutionized design, media, most workplaces and especially the lives of children, who routinely tap into vast social and information pools outside school. Yet, generally speaking, it has hardly touched public education.

The traditional school structure strikes Salen as “weird.” “You go to a math class, and that is the only place math is happening, and you are supposed to learn math just in that one space,” she told me one day, sitting in the small room at the school that served as Quest to Learn’s operational headquarters. She was dressed in a purple skirt with a hot pink scarf knotted around her neck. “There’s been this assumption that school is the only place that learning is happening, that everything a kid is supposed to know is delivered between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., and it happens in the confines of a building,” she said. “But the fact is that kids are doing a lot of interesting learning outside of school. We acknowledge that, and we are trying to bring that into their learning here.”

WAITING IN THE HALLWAY LINE to go into Sports for the Mind class one day last winter, I met a boy named Kai Goree. He was dressed in a red T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. He had a puckish mouth, vivid brown eyes and short dark hair, pieces of which had been dyed in vibrant shingles of blue and green, not unlike what you might expect to find on the roof of a fairy-tale house.

Kai was 11. He sometimes got into trouble with teachers for talking too much. In the next 10 minutes, as we wandered into class and found seats and waited for everybody else to settle in, plus a few minutes beyond that, Kai relayed the following bits of information: he lived with his parents and older brother in an apartment on East 56th Street. He was a huge fan of professional wrestling. At home he sometimes filmed and edited his own wrestling-­news commentaries or demonstrated wrestling moves on a giant plush gorilla he had named Green Gangsta. Then he put them on YouTube, where he had several personal channels. At home, his family had a “very awesome big computer.” He also had an Android phone, but at that point was lusting after a Flip camera and a MacBook as well. He preferred OS X, but his dad, alas, was “a die-hard Windows fan,” so the prospects for a Mac were unclear. If I was interested, I could follow him on Twitter. (Sample post from Kai: “I AM SO ANGRY. My mom is not letting me get a coolatta from dunkin donuts…”) He used to have a blog, but it took too much time so he dropped it.

What he cared about most was games. “Games and games and games,” he said. He had been playing games since he was about 18 months old, when his mother, who is a college professor, introduced him to a computer game called Reader Rabbit, intended to teach literacy skills. Like many of his friends, as he grew, he migrated from educational computer games to hand-held games to the Xbox 360.

At the start of middle school, Kai was almost a full decade into his digital life. This might have put him slightly ahead of his peers, but also, arguably, it made him more like the sixth grader of the near future. Research shows that, on average, children who have access to computers have mastered pointing and clicking with a mouse by the time they are 3½. They are also, thanks in part to mobile-phone apps, playing more games earlier in life. According to research by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, an arm of the Sesame Workshop that explores the educational potential of interactive media, 60 percent of the top-selling iPhone apps on the education store are made for toddlers and preschoolers.

In the evenings, once he met the requirements for parental face time and homework, Kai could be found riding an armored dune buggy around a post-apocalyptic African landscape, blasting his machine gun at squads of alien jackals (Halo 3) or catching and juking for a touchdown (Madden NFL 09) or maybe adding wikki wikki scratches to a Jay-Z tune (DJ Hero). Sometimes he fired up the family Wii and did virtually assisted yoga. I came to learn that Kai could dissect, analyze and recommend video games with the acuity of a French sommelier. He was waiting anxiously, he said, to hear back from “some people at Lucas” who may or may not use him to beta test a multiplayer Star Wars game that wasn’t yet on the market.

Kai’s passion for games was unusual, but only a little. Earlier this year, the Kaiser Family Foundation released the results of a national survey in which 60 percent of children 8 to 18 reported that a typical day included playing games on hand-held or console devices. Their average daily investment was about two hours. According to Kaiser’s data, the percentage of children playing digital games has increased by more than 50 percent in the last 10 years, and the amount of time they spend playing games has almost doubled. This follows research showing that the more time children spend playing video games, the less time they spend on homework. For educators, it’s a sorry equation and one that mirrors a larger paradox when it comes to the divergent and often competing paths of children and their schools.

Even as technology spending in K-12 public education has risen steadily in the last 20 years, student performance — as measured by test results — has improved only incrementally. Meanwhile, children are proving to be wildly adaptive when it comes to using media outside school. They are fervently making YouTube videos, piloting avatars through complex game scenarios, sampling music, lighting up social networks and inventing or retooling (or purists would say, bludgeoning) language so that it better suits the text-messaging pay plan on their cellphones, only to show up to school to find cellphones outlawed, Internet access filtered and computers partitioned off from the rest of the classroom — at least in many cases. Michael H. Levine, who directs the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, acknowledges the conundrum. While there may be sound reasons behind limiting things like Internet browsing and social networking at school, he says, it does little to teach students how to live in the 21st century. It also may contribute to a broader relevancy issue. A 2006 study financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation set out to examine the reasons that almost a third of American public-high-school students fail to graduate with their class. Researchers surveyed high-school dropouts in 25 cities, suburbs and small towns across the country, where they were told again and again that school was boring. The final report recommended, among other things, that educators take steps to “make school more relevant and engaging.”

One way to do this, according to Levine, would be to stop looking so critically at the way children use media and to start exploring how that energy might best be harnessed to help drive them academically. “Kids are literally wearing digital media,” he says. “It’s present everywhere in their lives, except for in the learning environment.” A game-based approach like that used at Quest to Learn shows a lot of promise, he says, in part because it capitalizes on something kids already love. He is careful to note that there will be “huge challenges” in bringing the idea to schools nationally. Clearly, not every community is going to have the money for interactive whiteboards, laptops and PlayStation consoles. Someone will also need to figure out how to train teachers, develop curriculums, establish assessment measures and decide to what extent the focus on systems thinking and design skills used in game-based learning should be tied to common standards — and win over parents. “Odds are it will take a long time,” Levine says. “But I don’t know what the alternative is. My view of it is that we will never get to the holy land in terms of educational performance unless we do something about the engagement factor.”

Often, watching the students and teachers at Quest to Learn, I was struck by how enviably resource-rich the school was, with its game designers and curriculum specialists and a full-time technologist wheeling carts of netbooks up and down the hallway. Salen recently told me that she is hoping to find a corner of the school where she can set up Rock Band — a video game in which users play drums, guitar and bass — “for teachers to unwind around.” The school functioned with the intensity of a high-stakes start-up. It was clear the staff members worked long hours. Still, if Quest to Learn was a “possibility space” — a sort of laboratory for the future of learning — you could also see how those possibilities might feel entirely out of reach to an educator working in a more typically cash-strapped, understaffed school.

Yet with the federal government focusing more on innovation, and given the deep pockets of similarly focused corporate foundations, it may be feasible to implement game-based learning, even modestly, into more schools. But not before it has been proved to work. Quest to Learn students who took federally mandated standardized tests last spring scored on average no better and no worse than other sixth graders in their district, according to Elisa Aragon, the school’s executive director. Valerie Shute, an assessment specialist in the educational psychology and learning systems department at Florida State University, is working on a MacArthur-financed effort to develop and test new assessment measures for Quest to Learn, which are meant to look at progress in areas like systems thinking, teamwork and time management. The federal government is likewise sponsoring an overhaul of standardized tests to be introduced in the 2014-2015 school year, with added emphasis on “higher order” thinking and problem-solving skills.

Quest to Learn’s most innovative piece of technology was set up in a corner of one classroom, looking something like an extremely wired stage set. This was the school’s $18,000 Smallab, which stands for “situated multimedia art learning lab,” a system now being used in a handful of schools and museums around the country. Created by a team led by David Birchfield, a media artist at Arizona State University, it is a 3-D learning environment, or in designspeak, a “hybrid physical-digital space.”

In Smallab sessions, students hold wands and Sputnik-like orbs whose movements are picked up by 12 scaffold-mounted motion-capture cameras and have an immediate effect inside the game space, which is beamed from a nearby computer onto the floor via overhead projector. It is a little bit like playing a multiplayer Wii game while standing inside the game instead of in front of it. Students can thus learn chemical titration by pushing king-size molecules around the virtual space. They can study geology by building and shifting digital layers of sediment and fossils on the classroom floor or explore complementary and supplementary angles by racing the clock to move a giant virtual protractor around the floor.

As new as the Smallab concept is, it is already showing promise when it comes to improving learning results: Birchfield and his colleagues say that in a small 2009 study, they found that at-risk ninth graders in earth sciences scored consistently and significantly higher on content-area tests when they had also done Smallab exercises. A second study compared the Smallab approach with traditional hands-on lab experimentation, with the group that used mixed-reality again showing greater retention and mastery. As it is more generally with games, the cognitive elements at work are not entirely understood, but they are of great interest to a growing number of learning scientists. Did the students learn more using digital mixed-reality because the process was more physical than hearing a classroom lecture or performing a lab experiment? Because it was more collaborative or more visual? Or was it simply because it seemed novel and more fun?

HERE ARE SOME DIFFERENCES between Kai and me: Kai hates Justin Bieber whereas I only dislike him. Kai sends and receives about 50 text messages a day. My average is about 4. My idea of leisure involves wandering aimlessly and anonymously through the local bookstore whereas Kai — “not a fan of books” — can be found hanging around the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, where he is on a first-name basis with employees. When I am sick with a cold, I sit at home flipping through magazines and not really wanting to be seen by anyone. When Kai is sick with a cold, he sits at home and makes YouTube videos. (“If I sneeze during this video,” he tells the camera, “don’t yell at me.”) We also feel very differently, it turns out, about the game Halo. Kai sees it as having amazing graphics and a great story line and violence, “but only against aliens,” he says. I see it mostly as violent.

One night at Kai’s apartment, we turned on the Xbox and played Halo 3 as teammates. He played the role of Master Chief, the ultimate superwarrior, and I was a friendly alien who liked to fight. It started like this: I sat on the couch, and Kai sat on the floor in front of the TV. He said, “You get the machine gun, and I’ll drive the car.” I’m not really sure what happened after that. I would call it a nine-minute-long, jackhammering bloodbath, in which we (me poorly, Kai deftly) killed a lot of bad aliens until my lack of experience almost cost our team the game, and — a little sweaty and yes, totally excited — I handed my controller off to Kai’s 14-year-old brother, Sam.

It was, for me, a reminder of how confusing it can be to think about video games and schools in the same frame. Not only has excessive gaming — much like excessive TV watching — been associated with obesity and depression, but playing violent games has been linked in some studies to an increase in aggressive behavior. Advocates of game-based learning concede that these games can be spectacularly gory, amoral and loud, even when they are artful and complicated. They like to point out that the majority of games sold commercially are not particularly violent and are rated “E” — for “everyone.”

And then this: Brain researchers have found that playing first-person shooter games like Call of Duty does seem to have some neurological benefits, including improving peripheral vision and the ability to focus attention. The playing of shooter games has also been shown to enhance something called visual-spatial thinking — for example, the ability to rotate objects in one’s mind — which, it turns out, is a cognitive building block for understanding concepts in science and engineering. Women, who tend to score lower when tested for visual-spatial skills, apparently gain more from virtual machine-gun outings than men: a 2007 study done at the University of Toronto showed that women who played just 10 hours of an action-oriented video game (Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault) not only improved their spatial attention and mental-­rotation abilities more significantly than their male counterparts, but the game-play also appeared to substantially reduce any sex-related gaps in visual-spatial thinking abilities. Five months later, the effects still held. (Bad news for pacifists: a control group that played a stimulating but nonviolent 3-D video puzzle game showed no measurable improvement.)

Unsurprisingly, no one I spoke with who works in the field of games and learning says that first-person shooter games are the key to building future scientists and engineers. One topic under discussion is the broader question of “transfer,” whether a skill developed by playing a game actually translates to improved abilities in other areas. They also note that we are only just beginning to tease apart the mechanisms that make game play so powerful. And inside those mechanisms, there is at least potential to advance our country’s educational aims — if only we can sort out how we feel about games. Even the first family has sent mixed messages: President Obama has criticized video games for displacing family time and physical activity — urging parents, for example, to “turn off the TV, put away the video games and read to your child” — but he has also encouraged the development of new games to bolster the all-important science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills in young Americans. In March, Michelle Obama helped introduce a government-sponsored design contest to reward those who create mobile-phone games and apps to combat obesity, lamenting at a national Parent Teacher Association conference that “we know our kids spend way too much time with these games,” but that at least the time could be spent more productively. The cognitive dissonance is likely familiar to any parent: she has also admitted, cheerfully, to owning a Wii.

WHEN IT COMES TO CAPTURING and keeping the attention of children, game designers appear to be getting something right that schools, in many cases, are getting wrong. James Paul Gee, a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University who grew interested in video games when his son began playing them years ago, has written several seminal books on the power of video games to inspire learning. He says that in working through the levels of a complex game, a person is decoding its “internal design grammar” and that this is a form of critical thinking. “A game is nothing but a set of problems to solve,” Gee says. Its design often pushes players to explore, take risks, role-play and strategize — in other words putting a game’s informational content to use. Gee has advocated for years that our definition of “literacy” needs to be widened to better suit the times. Where a book provides knowledge, Gee says, a good game can provide a learner with knowledge and also experience solving problems using that knowledge.

Slowly, this idea has won some unlikely converts. The retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently introduced a Web site called iCivics, which features a series of interactive games meant to animate and revive the lost art of learning civics. “She was relatively hostile toward games,” says Gee, who collaborated with her on the project, “and now she’s a fan.” E. O. Wilson, the renowned Harvard evolutionary biologist, has lauded digital games for their ability to immerse and challenge players in vivid, virtual environments. “I think games are the future in education,” Wilson said in an interview with the game designer Will Wright last year. “We’re going through a rapid transition now. We’re about to leave print and textbooks behind.”

In a speech given the day before the start of the 2009 G-20 economic summit, Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, offered his own tacit approval, suggesting that playing video games, especially online multiplayer games, fosters collaboration, and that collaboration, in turn, fosters innovation — making it good training for a career in technology. “Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game,” Schmidt said. “If I were 15 years old, that’s what I’d be doing right now.”

All this goes back to the debate over what constitutes “21st-century skills.” How do schools manage to teach new media without letting go of old media? Is it possible to teach game design and still find time for “The Catcher in the Rye”? One afternoon at Quest to Learn, I sat with Al Doyle in an empty office. Doyle had been teaching Sports for the Mind for only a few months — and at the end of the school year, he would end up leaving Quest to Learn to teach game design at a private school elsewhere in Manhattan — but the experience was causing him to think differently about what schools should be teaching. His students were building 3-D computer games and had also just finished a unit on podcasting. “Ten years ago, it would have taken a week to get kids to learn the difference between ‘save’ and ‘save as,’ ” he said. “Now I show them GarageBand” — a digital audio sequencer produced by Apple — “and five minutes later they’re recording and editing sound.” Doyle made a point that others had also made: whatever digital fluidity his students possessed, it hadn’t been taught to them, at least not by adults.

Here, perhaps, was a paradigm shift. As Doyle saw it, his role was moving from teaching toward facilitating, building upon learning being done outside school. He talked about all the wasted energy that goes into teaching things that students don’t need so much anymore, thanks to the tools now available to them. Why memorize the 50 states and their capitals? Why, in the age of Google and pocket computers, memorize anything? “Handwriting?” Doyle said. “That’s a 20th-century skill.” Realizing this sounded radical, he amended his thought, saying that students should learn to write, but that keyboarding was far more important. He took aim at spelling, calling it “outmoded.” Then he went back to podcasting, saying that after a student has written, revised, scripted and recorded a podcast, “it’s just as valid as writing an essay.”

I must have been wearing the shocked expression of an old-guard English major, because Doyle tried to put a finer point on it. “We feel like we’re preparing these kids to be producers of media — whether they become graphic designers, video designers, journalists, publishers, communicators, bloggers, whatever,” he said. “The goal is that they’re comfortable expressing themselves in any media, whether it’s video, audio, podcast, the written word, the spoken word or the animated feature.” He added: “Game design is the platform that we can hook them into because this is where they live. Video games are more important to them than film, than broadcast television, than journalism. This is their medium. Games are this generation’s rock and roll.”

SPEND TIME AT a middle school — even a hyperinnovative one like Quest to Learn — and one thing becomes immediately apparent: Being a sixth grader is a timeless art. Kids chew gum when they’re not supposed to. They ask for hugs from teachers when they need them. They get rowdy in gym class, dip Oreos in their chocolate-milk cartons at lunch, pick bits of food out of their braces and shout things like, “Hey, your epidermis is showing!” There is little they like to do quietly.

“I am really sorry it is taking you so long to sit in your chairs today,” an aggrieved Doyle was calling over the din one morning at the start of class. In the brief quiet that followed, he announced that, connected to work they were doing on ancient architecture, each student was to design a game that took place inside either a labyrinth, a pyramid or a cave. This would happen using an online game-making platform called Gamestar Mechanic, which was developed by Katie Salen and a team and is soon to be sold commercially. The platform allows users to learn game-making skills without being versed in programming language.

A hand shot up. It was Ellisa, a diminutive girl who wore her hair in a giant ponytailed puff on one side of her head. “Al, can I do a game with a cave, a pyramid and a labyrinth?”

“Sorry, you may not.”

Another hand. “What about a pyramid with a labyrinth inside of it?”

Doyle shook his head. “Just one,” he said.

Sitting in front of laptops, the students started in on their game-building, each one beginning with a blank screen. They created borders, paths and obstacles by dragging and dropping small cubes from a menu. They chose an animated sprite to serve as a game’s protagonist. They picked enemy sprites and set them marching in various patterns around the screen. They wrote the text that introduced the game and the text that flashed when a player reaches a new level. (“If the entrance to your cave is being guarded by a bear or a woolly mammoth,” said Doyle, sounding teacherly, “you have to tell us it’s a bear or a woolly mammoth.”) They added a variety of rewards and punishments. If the game seemed too easy, they made it harder. If the game seemed too hard, they made it easier. Earlier that day, I watched a girl named Maya make a game. She created a labyrinth, changed all the colors, swapped enemies in and out, changed the background, changed the music and finally set the game’s timer to 90 seconds. Then she played her game and finished it in 75. She adjusted the timer to 75 seconds and played again, this time losing. Finally, she set the timer at 80 and beat the game, but only just barely, at which point she declared the whole thing perfect.

The work appeared simple, but the challenge was evident. Twenty minutes in, the Sports for the Mind classroom was hushed but for the sound of keyboards being pounded and a faint arcadelike cacophony of poinging and bleeping over the syncopated pulse of game music. That night for homework, they would play one another’s games and write up constructive critiques.

The gold standard in class, I was told by nearly every student I spoke with, was to create a game that was hard to beat but harder still to quit. Kai was sitting in one corner working on a game he named What the Cave. It was teeming with robot enemies. “The whole point,” Kai said, “is you want your game to be hard, but you want it to be good.” He studied his screen for a moment. Then using his mouse, he deftly deleted a row of enemies. “What you want,” he said finally, “is good-hard.”

The language of gamers is, when you begin to decipher it, the language of strivers. People who play video games speak enthusiastically about “leveling up” and are always shooting for the epic win. Getting to the end of even a supposedly simple video game can take 15 or more hours of play time, and it almost always involves failure — lots and lots of failure.

This concept is something that Will Wright, who is best known for designing the Sims game franchise and the 2008 evolution-related game Spore, refers to as “failure-based learning,” in which failure is brief, surmountable, often exciting and therefore not scary. A well-built game is, in essence, a series of short-term feedback loops, delivering assessment in small, frequent doses. This in the end may be both more palatable and also more instructive to someone trying to learn. According to Ntiedo Etuk, the chief executive of Tabula Digita, which designs computer games that are now being used in roughly 1,200 schools around the country, children who persist in playing a game are demonstrating a valuable educational ideal. “They play for five minutes and they lose,” he says. “They play for 10 minutes and they lose. They’ll go back and do it a hundred times. They’ll fail until they win.” He adds: “Failure in an academic environment is depressing. Failure in a video game is pleasant. It’s completely aspirational.”

It is also, says James Paul Gee, antithetical to the governing reality of today’s public schools. “If you think about kids in school — especially in our testing regime — both the teacher and the student think that failure will lead to disaster,” he says. “That’s pretty much a guarantee that you’ll never get to truly deep learning.” Gee and others in the games-and-learning field have suggested that someday, if we choose to channel our resources into developing more and better games for use in classrooms, the games themselves could feasibly replace tests altogether. Students, by virtue of making it through the escalating levels of a game that teaches, say, the principles of quantum physics, will demonstrate their mastery simply by finishing the game. Or, as Gee says: “Think about it: if I make it through every level of Halo, do you really need to give me a test to see if I know everything it takes to get through every level of Halo?”

One day last spring, Jan Plass, a professor of educational communication and technology at New York University, and I were sitting in a classroom at the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women, a girls-only public middle school in Brooklyn, where he and several graduate students were conducting research. Plass works at an organization called the Games for Learning Institute, directed by Ken Perlin, an N.Y.U. computer-science professor, that is dedicated to exploring the granular details of what makes games so mesmerizing and effective for learning.

We were watching a small group of sixth-to-eighth-grade girls play a relatively low-tech math game on a series of laptops. The girls played in pairs, solving equations to score points. All the while, the laptops’ built-in cameras recorded their voices and faces, while an imbedded piece of software tracked their movements inside the game. What Plass and his research team were hoping to find inside this data — which was being collected at 12 New York schools — were answers about whether children learn more when playing individually or collaboratively. (In order to measure progress, researchers gave the students tests before and after the game playing.)

Two of the girls were talking and pointing at the screen. “They’re spending time discussing how to solve the problem,” Plass said in a low voice. “They might not solve as many problems. But the question for us is whether the conversation adds to the learning, versus if they spent their time on more practice. Does discourse result in deeper processing?”

A question like this is, of course, as old as Socrates and not at all limited to game-oriented learning. But given that digital games like those designed by Plass and his colleagues allow researchers to capture and examine a student’s second-by-second decision-making, they offer what seem to be uniquely refined opportunities to peer into the cognitive process. What they are studying, Plass said, is the science behind focused engagement — a psychological phenomenon known as “flow.”

Much of this work is still in its infancy. Neuroscientists have connected game play to the production of dopamine, a powerful neuro­transmitter central to the brain’s reward-seeking system and thought to drive motivation and memory processing (and more negatively, addictive behaviors) — all of which could have implications for how, when and what type of games should be used to advance children’s learning. But as it is with just about everything involving teaching and learning, there are no simple answers. Games, for example, appear to trigger greater dopamine releases in men than women, which could mean that game-based learning is more effective with boys than girls. Or, says Plass, it could be a matter of design: ideally, games can be built in such a way that they adapt to the individual learning styles of their players.

Paul Howard-Jones, a neuroscientist who teaches in the graduate school of education at the University of Bristol in Britain and coordinates the NeuroEducational Research Network, says that dopamine sends a “ready to learn” signal to the brain, essentially priming it to receive new information pleasurably. His research has shown that children’s engagement levels are higher when they are anticipating a reward but cannot predict whether they will get it — or, as Howard-Jones put it to me, “when you move from a conventional educational atmosphere to something that more resembles sport.” He is careful to add that games are not meant to supplant teachers nor undermine the value of more traditional learning. “Children need to learn how to read a book,” he says. “They need to learn how to ask questions.” But as our understanding of both cognitive science and game design continues to advance, he says that game play will find a central place inside schools. “I think in 30 years’ time,” he says, “we will marvel that we ever tried to deliver a curriculum without gaming.”

One day last winter, I watched students at Quest to Learn playing with a different sort of technological tool — a newly introduced online social network for the school that had been built by Salen and her team of designers and was open to students, staff members and parents. The network, called Being Me, looked like a starter Facebook. In the coming weeks, mostly through the school’s wellness class, students would work on learning things like how to tag photos, update their status, credit the work of others, comment meaningfully on blog posts and navigate the complex politics of “friending.” It was another effort on the school’s part to look at the things kids are already doing — social networking, playing video games, tinkering with digital media — and try to help them do it with more thought and purpose, to recognize both their role and their influence inside a larger system.

Being Me had been online for just one day, but it was already zinging with activity, as most of the students seemed to have logged on overnight. Isabel posted a video of herself riding a horse. Clyde put up a survey querying everyone on whether PlayStation 3 was better than Xbox 360. Charles blogged about a new restaurant he tried. (“I had the Caprese pizza. The tomato had a lot of flavor.”) Kai posted a video — now being watched by practically everyone in the class — of himself dressed in a pink wig and a red raincoat, pretending to be a girl he called “Heather.” Comments began to pile up. “Cool beans,” a girl sitting nearby wrote. Then another from a boy named Nuridin: “Dude, stop making me die over here. LOL.”

Seeing this as learning required a kind of leap — the same way it required a leap to watch students build digital mazes and load them with plinking cartoon sprites and imagine it might make them more successful as future adults — that it would possibly help them untangle and rebuild whatever broken systems we will have left for them. The electric pencil sharpener buzzed from a corner.

I watched a long-haired kid named Akahr pull up his profile on Being Me and spend a moment pondering what he would do for his first official status update. By design of the network, every status update began with the words “I am . . .” after which students could choose from an array of designated verbs and objects listed on drop-down menus. Most of the sixth graders were mixing and matching with a kind of frenzied abandon, playfully testing every last variation, posting their updates and waiting for a peal of laughter from somewhere in the classroom — a sign their status had been read. There was, “I am dancing Godzilla” and “I am hugging my bed.” Akhar clicked on his menu and pondered his options. Around the classroom, there were students respecting eggs and creating soy sauce and reading glitter and looking for Paris. Was this learning or a distraction from learning? Serious or not serious? Or was it possible, somehow, that it was both? Word by word, Akahr made his choices: “I am . . . imagining . . . the future.”


Sara Corbett is a contributing writer for the magazine. She wrote about the publication of Carl Jung’s “Red Book” last year.

    Learning by Playing: Video Games in the Classroom, NYT, 15.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19video-t.html

Back to School: Grading the Teacher

September 7, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Formula to Grade Teachers’ Skill Gains Acceptance, and Critics” (front page, Sept. 1):

Advocates of the value-added model to evaluate teachers justify their position by claiming that is how business works. Yet all prospectuses of mutual funds warn in bold letters that past performance is no guarantee of future results.

If that is the case, then why are students’ scores on state tests in one year used as the basis to predict their likely scores on state tests at the end of the subsequent year to establish the value added by teachers? The flagrant double standard would be risible if it did not carry such serious consequences.

Walt Gardner
Los Angeles, Sept. 1, 2010

The writer’s Reality Check blog is published in Education Week.

•

To the Editor:

The value-added methodology is an absolutely essential tool to understand better how individual students improve from year to year. Its greatest asset is that it helps to highlight and recognize teachers and schools that take on students who start at the lowest rung on the achievement ladder, and who help “push students up.”

Such data, combined with effective in-class observation of teaching skills, dramatically increases our understanding of how well teachers and schools help to advance students’ learning. The fact that it is not a perfect system should not disqualify it from use; no evaluation system in any profession is perfect.

James E. Sailer
Brooklyn, Sept. 1, 2010

The writer was director of performance management, Office of the Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, 2003-04.

•

To the Editor:

The value-added method to grade teachers sounds fantastic! Now how about applying it to school administrators themselves, highly paid consultants brought in for “professional development” and expensive, corporation-developed textbooks?

Ranjeet Tate
Amherst, N.Y., Sept. 1, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Teaching is a complex profession, and a practitioner can always improve. During my career I hungered for feedback that would help me refine my practice. I continually collected data on my students’ achievements, and that was enlightening. My principal observed me at least twice a year and occasionally offered thought-provoking comments that proved useful. What I thought would be an ideal addition to the mix was feedback from my colleagues, my students, and their families, collected systematically. This I never got.

If the point of evaluation is not punishment, but improved practice, the more “data points” available the better. Too bad the current fad in education reform relies on the single — and perhaps flawed — metric of “value-added.”

Denise Gelberg
Ithaca, N.Y., Sept. 1, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Your article was welcome news. If the two national teachers unions had embraced transparent competency testing for teachers long ago, instead of putting up roadblocks, we would not now have to invent a new system of metrics so that all our children can be taught by qualified, skilled and capable teachers.

The new system may have a few flaws to be worked out, but it is better than a subjective system directed by administrators with little daily hands-on experience in the classroom. Education is the future of our country, and the quality of our teachers will determine whether we succeed or fail.

William Kent
Benton, Pa., Sept. 1, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Regarding the usefulness of value-added scores for teachers, why shouldn’t parents be given the opportunity to enroll their children for individual teachers, not just schools, using such a tool? Teacher union leaders who oppose value-added reporting systems are demonstrating that when forced to choose between protecting the jobs of ineffective teachers and improving educational options for children, their dues-paying members come first.

Historically, newspapers have produced many of the nation’s best school report cards. If The Times followed The Los Angeles Times’s lead for Big Apple schools, the results would be extremely valuable.

Don Soifer
Arlington, Va., Sept. 1, 2010

The writer is executive vice president of the Lexington Institute.

    Back to School: Grading the Teacher, NYT, 7.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/08/opinion/l08teachers.html

Formula to Grade Teachers’ Skill Gains Acceptance, and Critics

August 31, 2010
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

How good is one teacher compared with another?

A growing number of school districts have adopted a system called value-added modeling to answer that question, provoking battles from Washington to Los Angeles — with some saying it is an effective method for increasing teacher accountability, and others arguing that it can give an inaccurate picture of teachers’ work.

The system calculates the value teachers add to their students’ achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.

People who analyze the data, making a few statistical assumptions, can produce a list ranking teachers from best to worst.

Use of value-added modeling is exploding nationwide. Hundreds of school systems, including those in Chicago, New York and Washington, are already using it to measure the performance of schools or teachers. Many more are expected to join them, partly because the Obama administration has prodded states and districts to develop more effective teacher-evaluation systems than traditional classroom observation by administrators.

Though the value-added method is often used to help educators improve their classroom teaching, it has also been a factor in deciding who receives bonuses, how much they are and even who gets fired.

Michelle A. Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, fired about 25 teachers this summer after they rated poorly in evaluations based in part on a value-added analysis of scores.

And 6,000 elementary school teachers in Los Angeles have found themselves under scrutiny this summer after The Los Angeles Times published a series of articles about their performance, including a searchable database on its Web site that rates them from least effective to most effective. The teachers’ union has protested, urging a boycott of the paper.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan weighed in to support the newspaper’s work, calling it an exercise in healthy transparency. In a speech last week, though, he qualified that support, noting that he had never released to news media similar information on teachers when he was the Chicago schools superintendent.

“There are real issues and competing priorities and values that we must work through together — balancing transparency, privacy, fairness and respect for teachers,” Mr. Duncan said. On The Los Angeles Times’s publication of the teacher data, he added, “I don’t advocate that approach for other districts.”

A report released this month by several education researchers warned that the value-added methodology can be unreliable.

“If these teachers were measured in a different year, or a different model were used, the rankings might bounce around quite a bit,” said Edward Haertel, a Stanford professor who was a co-author of the report. “People are going to treat these scores as if they were reflections on the effectiveness of the teachers without any appreciation of how unstable they are.”

Other experts disagree.

William L. Sanders, a senior research manager for a North Carolina company, SAS, that does value-added estimates for districts in North Carolina, Tennessee and other states, said that “if you use rigorous, robust methods and surround them with safeguards, you can reliably distinguish highly effective teachers from average teachers and from ineffective teachers.”

Dr. Sanders helped develop value-added methods to evaluate teachers in Tennessee in the 1990s. Their use spread after the 2002 No Child Left Behind law required states to test in third to eighth grades every year, giving school districts mountains of test data that are the raw material for value-added analysis.

In value-added modeling, researchers use students’ scores on state tests administered at the end of third grade, for instance, to predict how they are likely to score on state tests at the end of fourth grade.

A student whose third-grade scores were higher than 60 percent of peers statewide is predicted to score higher than 60 percent of fourth graders a year later.

If, when actually taking the state tests at the end of fourth grade, the student scores higher than 70 percent of fourth graders, the leap in achievement represents the value the fourth-grade teacher added.

Even critics acknowledge that the method can be more accurate for rating schools than the system now required by federal law, which compares test scores of succeeding classes, for instance this year’s fifth graders with last year’s fifth graders.

But when the method is used to evaluate individual teachers, many factors can lead to inaccuracies. Different people crunching the numbers can get different results, said Douglas N. Harris, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. For example, two analysts might rank teachers in a district differently if one analyst took into account certain student characteristics, like which students were eligible for free lunch, and the other did not.

Millions of students change classes or schools each year, so teachers can be evaluated on the performance of students they have taught only briefly, after students’ records were linked to them in the fall.

In many schools, students receive instruction from multiple teachers, or from after-school tutors, making it difficult to attribute learning gains to a specific instructor. Another problem is known as the ceiling effect. Advanced students can score so highly one year that standardized state tests are not sensitive enough to measure their learning gains a year later.

In Houston, a district that uses value-added methods to allocate teacher bonuses, Darilyn Krieger said she had seen the ceiling effect as a physics teacher at Carnegie Vanguard High School.

“My kids come in at a very high level of competence,” Ms. Krieger said.

After she teaches them for a year, most score highly on a state science test but show little gains, so her bonus is often small compared with those of other teachers, she said.

The Houston Chronicle reports teacher bonuses each year in a database, and readers view the size of the bonus as an indicator of teacher effectiveness, Ms. Krieger said.

“I have students in class ask me why I didn’t earn a higher bonus,” Ms. Krieger said. “I say: ‘Because the system decided I wasn’t doing a good enough job. But the system is flawed.’ ”

This year, the federal Department of Education’s own research arm warned in a study that value-added estimates “are subject to a considerable degree of random error.”

And last October, the Board on Testing and Assessments of the National Academies, a panel of 13 researchers led by Dr. Haertel, wrote to Mr. Duncan warning of “significant concerns” that the Race to the Top grant competition was placing “too much emphasis on measures of growth in student achievement that have not yet been adequately studied for the purposes of evaluating teachers and principals.”

“Value-added methodologies should be used only after careful consideration of their appropriateness for the data that are available, and if used, should be subjected to rigorous evaluation,” the panel wrote. “At present, the best use of VAM techniques is in closely studied pilot projects.”

Despite those warnings, the Department of Education made states with laws prohibiting linkages between student data and teachers ineligible to compete in Race to the Top, and it designed its scoring system to reward states that use value-added calculations in teacher evaluations.

“I’m uncomfortable with how fast a number of states are moving to develop teacher-evaluation systems that will make important decisions about teachers based on value-added results,” said Robert L. Linn, a testing expert who is an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

“They haven’t taken caution into account as much as they need to,” Professor Linn said.

    Formula to Grade Teachers’ Skill Gains Acceptance, and Critics, NYT, 31.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/education/01teacher.html

Closing the Racial Gap in Education

August 21, 2010
The New York Times
 

To the Editor:

Re “Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in City Schools” (front page, Aug. 16):

As a teacher and psychologist for 35 years in New York City public schools, I and my colleagues saw and fought the devastating effects of chronic deprivation, neglect, poverty, single-parent households, foster care, parental incarceration and drug use, and other ills before the mayor and chancellor blamed the staffs of the schools for poor academic progress.

It is time for this administration, which graded schools and teachers based on inaccurate and misleading numbers, to cease blaming teachers and principals and join with them in struggling to meet our students’ needs. School staffs were never the primary problem. They aren’t now.

Charles Merrill
New York, Aug. 16, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Having taught in the New York City public schools for almost 40 years, I can say for sure that there is no magic bullet for the racial gap. For different students, different solutions must be found.

Additional education in small groups and tutoring have to be part of the solution. So do smaller class sizes, mentoring and arts education. Improving the home environment, reducing television viewing, encouraging reading and rewarding good students are also needed. Getting better teachers by paying them more is another vital component.

There is no single solution; the right answer is “E,” all of the above.

Jay Stonehill
Atlantic Beach, N.Y., Aug. 16, 2010

•

To the Editor:

I marveled at the range of opinions that learned people gave about the reasons for the racial gap in test scores. Reasons mentioned in your article included our struggling economy and “an increase in fatherless black households.” In other words, they blamed the students and their families.

But one cause the article did not mention is the elephant in the room when it comes to education: racism. As an elementary educator, I’ve seen both systemic and situational racism work actively against my students of color.

It’s not until these elusive beasts are acknowledged and dealt with honestly that true educational progress for all of our students will occur. Perhaps New York City schools, instead of the tired “blame the students” mentality, need to look at themselves first.

Jim Hiller
Beaverton, Ore., Aug. 16, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made education a top priority and have never wavered from this. Is the job done? No. And both the chancellor and the mayor will be the first to say this.

But let’s not confuse test scores with accomplishment. Constantly moving the bar — state tests, national tests, changes (after the fact) in scoring tests — doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been progress and doesn’t mean that the racial gap isn’t improving.

The high school graduation rate is up, and good progress has been made at smaller schools, another priority for the chancellor and the mayor.

Education for urban kids has been failing for decades. I hope that it won’t take decades to reverse the trend. But improvement will be necessarily slow. If someone knew the answer to fixing education fast, we would surely have done it by now.

Marley Kaplan
Brooklyn, Aug. 16, 2010

The writer is president of the nonprofit organization Chess-in-the-Schools.

•

To the Editor:

Racial gaps in educational performance are a national epidemic. But the best way to narrow the achievement gap is to prevent it from forming, which research shows is evident as early as nine months of age.

The first five years of a child’s life are crucial in developing the brain architecture and skills necessary to succeed in school. Evaluations of Early Head Start indicate that children who receive services for five years beginning at birth fare better than those who spend only two years before kindergarten in preschool. Unfortunately, Early Head Start is underfunded and reaches very few eligible children.

Until we acknowledge the critical role that early education plays in shaping a child’s success in school and life, and properly finance quality birth-to-5 programs, racial and economic disparities in student achievement will persist.

Diana Mendley Rauner
Executive Director
Ounce of Prevention Fund
Chicago, Aug. 16, 2010

    Closing the Racial Gap in Education, NYT, 21.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/l22schools.html

Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in City Schools

August 15, 2010
The New York Times
By SHARON OTTERMAN and ROBERT GEBELOFF

Two years ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, testified before Congress about the city’s impressive progress in closing the gulf in performance between minority and white children. The gains were historic, all but unheard of in recent decades.

“Over the past six years, we’ve done everything possible to narrow the achievement gap — and we have,” Mr. Bloomberg testified. “In some cases, we’ve reduced it by half.”

“We are closing the shameful achievement gap faster than ever,” the mayor said again in 2009, as city reading scores — now acknowledged as the height of a test score bubble — showed nearly 70 percent of children had met state standards.

When results from the 2010 tests, which state officials said presented a more accurate portrayal of students’ abilities, were released last month, they came as a blow to the legacy of the mayor and the chancellor, as passing rates dropped by more than 25 percentage points on most tests. But the most painful part might well have been the evaporation of one of their signature accomplishments: the closing of the racial achievement gap.

Among the students in the city’s third through eighth grades, 40 percent of black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students met state standards in math, compared with 75 percent of white students and 82 percent of Asian students. In English, 33 percent of black students and 34 percent of Hispanic students are now proficient, compared with 64 percent among whites and Asians.

“The claims were based on some bad information,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a research group that studies education policy. “On achievement, the story in New York City is of some modest progress, but not the miracle that the mayor and the chancellor would like to claim.”

Reducing racial gaps in educational performance has been a national preoccupation for decades. But after substantial progress in the 1970s and ’80s, the effort has largely stalled, except for a brief period from 1999 to 2004, where there were some gains, particularly in reading, according to a report released this month by the Educational Testing Service, which develops standardized tests used across the country.

The achievement gap was also the main thrust of the No Child Left Behind law, which mandated annual testing for all students in grades three through eight and required school systems to track the performance of each racial and ethnic group, with the goal of bringing all children to proficiency by 2014.

New York City’s progress in closing its achievement gap on those tests drew national attention as a possible model for other urban school districts. It won praise from President George W. Bush as evidence that No Child Left Behind was working. In 2007, the city won a prestigious urban education prize from the Broad Foundation, which cited the city’s progress in narrowing the racial achievement gap.

But the latest state math and English tests show that the proficiency gap between minority and white students has returned to about the same level as when the mayor arrived. In 2002, 31 percent of black students were considered proficient in math, for example, while 65 percent of white students met that standard.

Experts have many theories, but no clear answers, about why national progress on closing the gap has slowed. They included worsening economic conditions for poor families and an increase in fatherless black households, social factors that interfere with students’ educational progress.

Mr. Klein said in an interview that he was not discouraged by New York City’s performance on the 2010 state tests, and that he still felt “awfully good” about improvements for black and Hispanic students, noting their rising graduation rates and college enrollments.

“I don’t think we claimed it was a miracle; certainly I don’t believe it was a miracle,” he said. “I think there are sustained steady gains here, and I think that’s important.”

Unbowed, Mr. Klein said the new test results reinforced some of his beliefs and policies: he said he would continue to close low-performing schools, for example, and would keep pushing to pay more to teachers who work in hard-to-staff neighborhoods or subjects, which the teachers’ union has resisted.

The bulk of Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein’s effort to overhaul the education system has been focused on the lowest-performing students. The city has closed 91 poorly performing schools, established about 100 charter schools and sent waves of new young teachers and principals into schools in poor neighborhoods.

Mr. Klein began to use test scores to measure schools’ performance, and joined with the Rev. Al Sharpton in forming the Education Equality Project in 2008 to promote good instruction and education reform for minority and poor children. “It is certainly what makes Joel Klein tick,” said Kati Haycock, the president of the Education Trust, which advocates for progress on the issue. “And you can’t say that for everyone.”

The city has even tried to attack the deeper issue of how children are reared at home, by offering some families monetary incentives to go to the dentist for checkups, for example, or to maintain good school attendance. The three-year-old pilot project was ended in March after it showed only modest results.

For several years, data suggested that the city had seen improvements among all ethnic groups, including in graduation rates, which have risen about 14 percentage points for black and Hispanic students since 2005, and a national standardized test given every other year to a sampling of fourth and eighth graders.

Even so, the scores on the national test, considered tougher than the state tests, did not exactly show a mastery of material. Forty-nine percent of white students and 17 percent of black students showed proficiency on the fourth-grade English test in 2009, for example, up from 45 percent of white students and 13 percent of black students in 2003.

The city made no statistically significant progress in closing the racial achievement gap in that time, said Arnold Goldstein, a statistician at the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the national test. With few exceptions, including Charlotte, N.C., and Washington, D.C., the achievement gap on the national tests has remained constant in all major cities.

But the test scores that the mayor and the chancellor chose to highlight were the state standardized tests, and they built their entire system around it, with schools’ A-through-F grades, teachers’ bonuses and now tenure decisions dependent on how well their students performed on the tests.

By 2009, the passing rates of black students on English exams had narrowed to within 22 percentage points of white students’, and within 17 points on the math exams. And charter schools, which predominantly serve black students, were doing so well that one Stanford University researcher proclaimed that they had practically eliminated the “Harlem-Scarsdale” gap in math.

But skeptics argued that comparing passing rates was flawed because they did not account for whether a student passed by a little or a lot. In New York City, black and Hispanic students were far more likely to pass with scores barely above the minimum requirement, thereby masking the real difference in performance among groups.

The State Education Department recalibrated the scoring of the tests this year, raising the number of correct answers needed to pass and saying that the previous standards were not accurate measures of what students needed to know at each grade level. When that happened, the passing rates of white and Asian students dropped a little, but those of black and Hispanic students plummeted.

Asian students have generally performed better than white students on state math tests in the city, and about the same on English tests. Those gaps have remained fairly consistent over the years.

While the slow improvement of all groups is “still a success story,” Mr. Petrilli said, the achievement gap, which shows how different groups perform relative to one another, still means that most black and Hispanic students will be at a sharp disadvantage when they have to compete against white and Asian peers as they move through schools and into the workplace.

While the gap is not closing, Mr. Klein said he was encouraged that the scores for black and Hispanic students were rising nonetheless.

“Do I wish that we had eliminated the entire achievement gap?” he said. “Sure.”

Jennifer Medina contributed reporting.
 

    Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in City Schools, NYT, 15.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/nyregion/16gap.html

Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot

July 10, 2010
The New York Times
By BENEDICT CAREY and JOHN MARKOFF

LOS ANGELES — The boy, a dark-haired 6-year-old, is playing with a new companion.

The two hit it off quickly — unusual for the 6-year-old, who has autism — and the boy is imitating his playmate’s every move, now nodding his head, now raising his arms.

“Like Simon Says,” says the autistic boy’s mother, seated next to him on the floor.

Yet soon he begins to withdraw; in a video of the session, he covers his ears and slumps against the wall.

But the companion, a three-foot-tall robot being tested at the University of Southern California, maintains eye contact and performs another move, raising one arm up high.

Up goes the boy’s arm — and now he is smiling at the machine.

In a handful of laboratories around the world, computer scientists are developing robots like this one: highly programmed machines that can engage people and teach them simple skills, including household tasks, vocabulary or, as in the case of the boy, playing, elementary imitation and taking turns.

So far, the teaching has been very basic, delivered mostly in experimental settings, and the robots are still works in progress, a hackers’ gallery of moving parts that, like mechanical savants, each do some things well at the expense of others.

Yet the most advanced models are fully autonomous, guided by artificial intelligence software like motion tracking and speech recognition, which can make them just engaging enough to rival humans at some teaching tasks.

Researchers say the pace of innovation is such that these machines should begin to learn as they teach, becoming the sort of infinitely patient, highly informed instructors that would be effective in subjects like foreign language or in repetitive therapies used to treat developmental problems like autism.

Several countries have been testing teaching machines in classrooms. South Korea, known for its enthusiasm for technology, is “hiring” hundreds of robots as teacher aides and classroom playmates and is experimenting with robots that would teach English.

Already, these advances have stirred dystopian visions, along with the sort of ethical debate usually confined to science fiction. “I worry that if kids grow up being taught by robots and viewing technology as the instructor,” said Mitchel Resnick, head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “they will see it as the master.”

Most computer scientists reply that they have neither the intention, nor the ability, to replace human teachers. The great hope for robots, said Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, “is that with the right kind of technology at a critical period in a child’s development, they could supplement learning in the classroom.”

Lessons From RUBI

“Kenka,” says a childlike voice. “Ken-ka.”

Standing on a polka-dot carpet at a preschool on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, a robot named RUBI is teaching Finnish to a 3-year-old boy.

RUBI looks like a desktop computer come to life: its screen-torso, mounted on a pair of shoes, sprouts mechanical arms and a lunchbox-size head, fitted with video cameras, a microphone and voice capability. RUBI wears a bandanna around its neck and a fixed happy-face smile, below a pair of large, plastic eyes.

It picks up a white sneaker and says kenka, the Finnish word for shoe, before returning it to the floor. “Feel it; I’m a kenka.”

In a video of this exchange, the boy picks up the sneaker, says “kenka, kenka” — and holds up the shoe for the robot to see.

In person they are not remotely humanlike, most of today’s social robots. Some speak well, others not at all. Some move on two legs, others on wheels. Many look like escapees from the Island of Misfit Toys.

They make for very curious company. The University of Southern California robot used with autistic children tracks a person throughout a room, approaching indirectly and pulling up just short of personal space, like a cautious child hoping to join a playground game.

The machine’s only words are exclamations (“Uh huh” for those drawing near; “Awww” for those moving away). Still, it’s hard to shake the sense that some living thing is close by. That sensation, however vague, is enough to facilitate a real exchange of information, researchers say.

In the San Diego classroom where RUBI has taught Finnish, researchers are finding that the robot enables preschool children to score significantly better on tests, compared with less interactive learning, as from tapes.

Preliminary results suggest that these students “do about as well as learning from a human teacher,” said Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego. “Social interaction is apparently a very important component of learning at this age.”

Like any new kid in class, RUBI took some time to find a niche. Children swarmed the robot when it first joined the classroom: instant popularity. But by the end of the day, a couple of boys had yanked off its arms.

“The problem with autonomous machines is that people are so unpredictable, especially children,” said Corinna E. Lathan, chief executive of AnthroTronix, a Maryland company that makes a remotely controlled robot, CosmoBot, to assist in therapy with developmentally delayed children. “It’s impossible to anticipate everything that can happen.”

The RUBI team hit upon a solution one part mechanical and two parts psychological. The engineers programmed RUBI to cry when its arms were pulled. Its young playmates quickly backed off at the sound.

If the sobbing continued, the children usually shifted gears and came forward — to deliver a hug.

Re-armed and newly sensitive, RUBI was ready to test as a teacher. In a paper published last year, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Joensuu in Finland found that the robot significantly improved the vocabulary of nine toddlers.

After testing the youngsters’ knowledge of 20 words and introducing them to the robot, the researchers left RUBI to operate on its own. The robot showed images on its screen and instructed children to associate them with words.

After 12 weeks, the children’s knowledge of the 10 words taught by RUBI increased significantly, while their knowledge of 10 control words did not. “The effect was relatively large, a reduction in errors of more than 25 percent,” the authors concluded.

Researchers in social robotics — a branch of computer science devoted to enhancing communication between humans and machines — at Honda Labs in Mountain View, Calif., have found a similar result with their robot, a three-foot character called Asimo, which looks like a miniature astronaut. In one 20-minute session the machine taught grade-school students how to set a table — improving their accuracy by about 25 percent, a recent study found.

At the University of Southern California, researchers have had their robot, Bandit, interact with children with autism. In a pilot study, four children with the diagnosis spent about 30 minutes with this robot when it was programmed to be socially engaging and another half-hour when it behaved randomly, more like a toy. The results are still preliminary, said David Feil-Seifer, who ran the study, but suggest that the children spoke more often and spent more time in direct interaction when the robot was responsive, compared with when it acted randomly.

Making the Connection

In a lab at the University of Washington, Morphy, a pint-size robot, catches the eye of an infant girl and turns to look at a toy.

No luck; the girl does not follow its gaze, as she would a human’s.

In a video the researchers made of the experiment, the girl next sees the robot “waving” to an adult. Now she’s interested; the sight of the machine interacting registers it as a social being in the young brain. She begins to track what the robot is looking at, to the right, the left, down. The machine has elicited what scientists call gaze-following, an essential first step of social exchange.

“Before they have language, infants pay attention to what I call informational hotspots,” where their mother or father is looking, said Andrew N. Meltzoff, a psychologist who is co-director of university’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. This, he said, is how learning begins.

This basic finding, to be published later this year, is one of dozens from a field called affective computing that is helping scientists discover exactly which features of a robot make it most convincingly “real” as a social partner, a helper, a teacher.

“It turns out that making a robot more closely resemble a human doesn’t get you better social interactions,” said Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at University of California, San Diego. The more humanlike machines look, the more creepy they can seem.

The machine’s behavior is what matters, Dr. Sejnowski said. And very subtle elements can make a big difference.

The timing of a robot’s responses is one. The San Diego researchers found that if RUBI reacted to a child’s expression or comment too fast, it threw off the interaction; the same happened if the response was too slow. But if the robot reacted within about a second and a half, child and machine were smoothly in sync.

Physical rhythm is crucial. In recent experiments at a day care center in Japan, researchers have shown that having a robot simply bob or shake at the same rhythm a child is rocking or moving can quickly engage even very fearful children with autism.

“The child begins to notice something in that synchronous behavior and open up,” said Marek Michalowski of Carnegie Mellon University, who collaborated on the studies. Once that happens, he said, “you can piggyback social behaviors onto the interaction, like eye contact, joint attention, turn taking, things these kids have trouble with.”

One way to begin this process is to have a child mimic the physical movements of a robot and vice versa. In a continuing study financed by the National Institutes of Health, scientists at the University of Connecticut are conducting therapy sessions for children with autism using a French robot called Nao, a two-foot humanoid that looks like an elegant Transformer toy. The robot, remotely controlled by a therapist, demonstrates martial arts kicks and chops and urges the child to follow suit; then it encourages the child to lead.

“I just love robots, and I know this is therapy, but I don’t know — I think it’s just fun,” said Sam, an 8-year-old from New Haven with Asperger’s syndrome, who recently engaged in the therapy.

This simple mimicry seems to build a kind of trust, and increase sociability, said Anjana Bhat, an assistant professor in the department of education who is directing the experiment. “Social interactions are so dependent on whether someone is in sync with you,” Dr. Bhat said. “You walk fast, they walk fast; you go slowly, they go slowly — and soon you are interacting, and maybe you are learning.”

Personality matters, too, on both sides. In their studies with Asimo, the Honda robot, researchers have found that when the robot teacher is “cooperative” (“I am going to put the water glass here; do you think you can help me by placing the water glass on the same place on your side?”), children 4 to 6 did much better than when Asimo lectured them, or allowed them to direct themselves (“place the cup and saucer anywhere you like”). The teaching approach made less difference with students ages 7 to 10.

“The fact is that children’s reactions to a robot may vary widely, by age and by individual,” said Sandra Okita, a Columbia University researcher and co-author of the study.

If robots are to be truly effective guides, in short, they will have to do what any good teacher does: learn from students when a lesson is taking hold and when it is falling flat.

Learning From Humans

“Do you have any questions, Simon?”

On a recent Monday afternoon, Crystal Chao, a graduate student in robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was teaching a five-foot robot named Simon to put away toys. She had given some instructions — the flower goes in the red bin, the block in the blue bin — and Simon had correctly put away several of these objects. But now the robot was stumped, its doughboy head tipped forward, its fawn eyes blinking at a green toy water sprinkler.

Dr. Chao repeated her query, perhaps the most fundamental in all of education: Do you have any questions?

“Let me see,” said Simon, in a childlike machine voice, reaching to pick up the sprinkler. “Can you tell me where this goes?”

“In the green bin,” came the answer.

Simon nodded, dropping it in that bin.

“Makes sense,” the robot said.

In addition to tracking motion and recognizing language, Simon accumulates knowledge through experience.

Just as humans can learn from machines, machines can learn from humans, said Andrea Thomaz, an assistant professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech who directs the project. For instance, she said, scientists could equip a machine to understand the nonverbal cues that signal “I’m confused” or “I have a question” — giving it some ability to monitor how its lesson is being received.

To ask, as Dr. Chao did: Do you have any questions?

This ability to monitor and learn from experience is the next great frontier for social robotics — and it probably depends, in large part, on unraveling the secrets of how the human brain accumulates information during infancy.

In San Diego, researchers are trying to develop a human-looking robot with sensors that approximate the complexity of a year-old infant’s abilities to feel, see and hear. Babies learn, seemingly effortlessly, by experimenting, by mimicking, by moving their limbs. Could a machine with sufficient artificial intelligence do the same? And what kind of learning systems would be sufficient?

The research group has bought a $70,000 robot, built by a Japanese company, that is controlled by a pneumatic pressure system that will act as its senses, in effect helping it map out the environment by “feeling” in addition to “seeing” with embedded cameras. And that is the easy part.

The much steeper challenge is to program the machine to explore, as infants do, and build on moment-to-moment experience. Ideally its knowledge will be cumulative, not only recalling the layout of a room or a house, but using that stored knowledge to make educated guesses about a new room.

The researchers are shooting for nothing less than capturing the foundation of human learning — or, at least, its artificial intelligence equivalent. If robots can learn to learn, on their own and without instruction, they can in principle make the kind of teachers that are responsive to the needs of a class, even an individual child.

Parents and educators would certainly have questions about robots’ effectiveness as teachers, as well as ethical concerns about potential harm they might do. But if social robots take off in the way other computing technologies have, parents may have more pointed ones: Does this robot really “get” my child? Is its teaching style right for my son’s needs, my daughter’s talents?

That is, the very questions they would ask about any teacher.


Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting from Seoul.

    Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot, NYT, 10.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/science/11robots.html

Colleges Spend More on Recreation Than Class

July 8, 2010
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

American colleges are spending a smaller share of their budgets on instruction, and more on recreational facilities for students and on administration, according to a new study of college costs.

The report, based on government data, documents a growing stratification of wealth across America’s system of higher education.

At the top of the pyramid are private colleges and universities, which educate a small portion of the nation’s students, while public universities and community colleges serve greater numbers, have fewer resources and are seeing tuitions rise most rapidly.

The study of trends in revenues and spending by American institutions of higher education from 1998 through 2008 traces how the patterns at elite private institutions like Harvard University and Amherst College differed from sprawling public universities like Ohio State and community colleges like Alabama Southern.

The United States is reputed to have the world’s wealthiest postsecondary education system, with average spending of around $19,000 per student compared with $8,400 across other developed countries, says the report, “Trends in College Spending 1998-2008,” by the Delta Cost Project, a nonprofit group in Washington that advocates for controlling costs to keep college affordable.

“Our analysis shows that these comparisons are misleading,” said Jane Wellman, the project’s executive director. “While the United States has some of the wealthiest institutions in the world, it also has a ‘system’ of postsecondary education with far more economic stratification than is true of any other country.”

Community colleges, which enroll about a third of students, spend close to $10,000 per student per year, Ms. Wellman said, while the private research institutions, which enroll far fewer students, spend an average $35,000 a year for each one.

Undergraduate and graduate enrollments nationwide grew to 18.6 million students overall in 2008 from 14.8 million in 1998, an increase of 26 percent, the report said. Among all the sectors that make up American postsecondary education, public community colleges added the most students over the decade, growing to 6.3 million from 5 million.

Enrollment at private colleges and universities, by comparison, grew to 2 million students from 1.8 million in the 10 years.

Tuition, on average, rose more rapidly over the decade at public institutions than it did at private ones. Average tuition rose 45 percent at public research universities and 36 percent at community colleges from 1998 to 2008, compared with about 21 percent at private research universities.

But the trend toward increased spending on nonacademic areas prevailed across the higher education spectrum, with public and private, elite and community colleges increasing expenditures more for student services than for instruction, the report said.

The student services category can include spending on career counseling and financial aid offices, but also on intramural athletics and student centers.

“This is the country-clubization of the American university,” said Richard Vedder, a professor at Ohio University who studies the economics of higher education. “A lot of it is for great athletic centers and spectacular student union buildings. In the zeal to get students, they are going after them on the basis of recreational amenities.”

On average, spending on instruction increased 22 percent over the decade at private research universities, about the same as tuition, but 36 percent for student services and 36 percent for institutional support, a category that includes general administration, legal services and public relations, the study said.

At public research universities, spending for student services rose 20 percent over the decade, compared with 10 percent for instruction.

Even at community colleges, with their far smaller budgets, spending on students services increased 9.5 percent, compared with 3.4 percent for instruction.

The study also said that the recession that began in the last months of 2008 has dramatically changed the economics of higher education, probably forever.

“The funding models we’ve created in higher ed are not sustainable,” Ms. Wellman said. “We ran up spending in the ’90s and early 2000s to levels we can’t maintain, and this is true not only in the elite privates, but in many of the public institutions, too.”

Now, with private-college endowments battered and state legislatures slashing university budgets coast to coast, “policymakers as well as university presidents and boards must learn to be better stewards of tuition and taxpayer dollars,” she said.

    Colleges Spend More on Recreation Than Class, NYT, 8.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/education/10education.html

To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery

July 5, 2010
The New York Times
By TRIP GABRIEL

ORLANDO, Fla. — The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida.

No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could disguise a student’s speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice outside.

The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen — using, say, a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test later — is easy to spot.

Scratch paper is allowed — but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later.

When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the student’s real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence.

Taylor Ellis, the associate dean who runs the testing center within the business school at Central Florida, the nation’s third-largest campus by enrollment, said that cheating had dropped significantly, to 14 suspected incidents out of 64,000 exams administered during the spring semester.

“I will never stop it completely, but I’ll find out about it,” Mr. Ellis said.

As the eternal temptation of students to cheat has gone high-tech — not just on exams, but also by cutting and pasting from the Internet and sharing of homework online like music files — educators have responded with their own efforts to crack down.

This summer, as incoming freshmen fill out forms to select roommates and courses, some colleges — Duke and Bowdoin among them — are also requiring them to complete online tutorials about plagiarism before they can enroll.

Anti-plagiarism services requiring students to submit papers to be vetted for copying is a booming business. Fifty-five percent of colleges and universities now use such a service, according to the Campus Computing Survey.

The best-known service, Turnitin.com, is engaged in an endless cat-and-mouse game with technologically savvy students who try to outsmart it. “The Turnitin algorithms are updated on an on-going basis,” the company warned last month in a blog post titled “Can Students ‘Trick’ Turnitin?”

The extent of student cheating, difficult to measure precisely, appears widespread at colleges. In surveys of 14,000 undergraduates over the last four years, an average of 61 percent admitted to cheating on assignments and exams.

The figure declined somewhat from 65 percent earlier in the decade, but the researcher who conducted the surveys, Donald L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers, doubts there is less of it. Instead, he suspects students no longer regard certain acts as cheating at all, for instance, cutting and pasting a few sentences at a time from the Internet.

Andrew Daines, who graduated in May from Cornell, where he served on a board in the College of Arts and Sciences that hears cheating cases, said Internet plagiarism was so common that professors told him they had replaced written assignments with tests and in-class writing.

Mr. Daines, a philosophy major, contributed to pages that Cornell added last month to its student Web site to bring attention to academic integrity. They include a link to a voluntary tutorial on avoiding plagiarism and a strongly worded admonition that “other generations may not have had as many temptations to cheat or plagiarize as yours,” and urging students to view this as a character test.

Mr. Daines said he was especially disturbed by an epidemic of students’ copying homework. “The term ‘collaborative work’ has been taken to this unbelievable extreme where it means, because of the ease of e-mailing, one person looking at someone else who’s done the assignment,” he said.

At M.I.T., David E. Pritchard, a physics professor, was able to accurately measure homework copying with software he had developed for another purpose — to allow students to complete sets of physics problems online. Some answered the questions so fast, “at first I thought we had some geniuses here at M.I.T.,” Dr. Pritchard said. Then he realized they were completing problems in less time than it took to read them and were copying the answers — mostly, it turned out, from e-mail from friends who had already done the assignment.

About 20 percent copied one-third or more of their homework, according to a study Dr. Pritchard and colleagues published this year. Students who copy homework find answers at sites like Course Hero, which is a kind of Napster of homework sharing, where students from more than 3,500 institutions upload papers, class notes and past exams.

Another site, Cramster, specializes in solutions to textbook questions in science and engineering. It boasts answers from 77 physics textbooks — but not Dr. Pritchard’s popular “Mastering Physics,” an online tutorial, because his publisher, Pearson, searches the Web for solutions and requests they be taken down to protect its copyright.

“You can use technology as well for detecting as for committing” cheating, Dr. Pritchard said.

The most popular anti-cheating technology, Turnitin.com, says it is now used by 9,500 high schools and colleges. Students submit written assignments to be compared with billions of archived Web pages and millions of other student papers, before they are sent to instructors. The company says that schools using the service for several years experience a decline in plagiarism.

Cheaters trying to outfox Turnitin have tried many tricks, some described in blogs and videos. One is to replace every “e” in plagiarized text with a foreign letter that looks like it, such as a Cyrillic “e,” meant to fool Turnitin’s scanners. Another is to use the Macros tool in Microsoft Word to hide copied text. Turnitin says neither scheme works.

Some educators have rejected the service and other anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.

Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”

For the similar reasons, some students at the University of Central Florida objected to the business school’s testing center with its eye-in-the-sky video in its early days, Dr. Ellis said.

But last week during final exams after a summer semester, almost no students voiced such concerns. Rose Calixte, a senior, was told during an exam to turn her cap backward, a rule meant to prevent students from writing notes under the brim. Ms. Calixte disapproved of the fashion statement but didn’t knock the reason: “This is college. There is the possibility for people to cheat.”

A first-year M.B.A. student, Ashley Haumann, said that when she was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, “everyone cheated” in her accounting class of 300 by comparing answers during quizzes. She preferred the highly monitored testing center because it “encourages you to be ready for the test because you can’t turn and ask, ‘What’d you get?’ ”

For educators uncomfortable in the role of anti-cheating enforcer, an online tutorial in plagiarism may prove an elegantly simple technological fix.

That was the finding of a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January. Students at an unnamed selective college who completed a Web tutorial were shown to plagiarize two-thirds less than students who did not. (The study also found that plagiarism was concentrated among students with lower SAT scores.)

The tutorial “had an outsize impact,” said Thomas S. Dee, a co-author, who is now an economist at the University of Virginia.

“Many instructors don’t want to create this kind of adversarial environment with their students where there is a presumption of guilt,” Mr. Dee said. “Our results suggest a tutorial worked by educating students rather than by frightening them.”

Only a handful of colleges currently require students to complete such a tutorial, which typically illustrates how to cite a source or even someone else’s ideas, followed by a quiz.

The tutorial that Bowdoin uses was developed with its neighbor colleges Bates and Colby several years ago. Part of the reason it is required for enrollment, said Suzanne B. Lovett, a Bowdoin psychology professor whose specialty is cognitive development, is that Internet-age students see so many examples of text, music and images copied online without credit that they may not fully understand the idea of plagiarism.

As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art.

    To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery, NYT, 5.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/education/06cheat.html

Schools Struggle to Educate the Severely Disabled

June 19, 2010
The New York Times
By SHARON OTTERMAN

Donovan Forde was dozing when the teacher came around to his end of the table. Pale winter light filtered in through the grated classroom window, and the warm room filled softly with jazz. It fell to his teacher’s aide to wake him up from his mid-morning nap.

She shined a small flashlight back and forth in his eyes like a dockworker signaling a ship, and called his name. Then she put her hand on his cheek, steering his head forward as he focused his eyes.

The teacher, Ricardo Torres, placed a red apple against Donovan’s closed left hand, and then held it near his nose so he could smell it. “Donovan, the fruit holds the seeds of the plant,” he said.

Then Mr. Torres held a plastic container of apple seeds to Donovan’s ear, shaking it, and placed Donovan’s hand inside so he could feel them. “And these are the seeds,” Mr. Torres said.

He watched Donovan’s eyes and face for a sign he had understood, a smile, nod, a noise. Donovan gently pulled his hand away. No one knew if he had grasped it.

At a time when his peers are enrolled in college or earning money at jobs, Donovan, a handsome 20-year-old with a sliver of a mustache, is still in public school, being taught the most basic of facts. His vocabulary for this science unit, which lasted about two weeks, was three words: seeds, fruit and juice.

And yet, because of his cognitive disabilities brought on by a traumatic brain injury at nearly 6 months old, it is almost impossible to know what he comprehends and retains. After 15 years in the New York City school system, he is less reserved and more social, but otherwise has shown almost no progress, his mother said.

Once predominately isolated in institutions, severely disabled students have been guaranteed a free, appropriate public education like all children since the passage of federal legislation in 1975. In the years since, school districts across the country have struggled to find a balance between instruction in functional skills and academics while providing basic custodial care.

Donovan is part of a fraction of a fraction, classified as having “multiple disabilities,” a broad category under the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act that refers to children who have at least two disabilities and severe educational needs.

There are 132,000 such students in the United States, out of more than 6.5 million now receiving some kind of special education service at an estimated cost of $74 billion a year.

Students with multiple disabilities, like Donovan and his schoolmates, can have a wide range of diagnoses, including cerebral palsy, rare genetic disorders and problems that stem from conditions in utero or at birth, some of which have no name.

For many of these students, the post-school future holds day residential programs, nursing facilities or group homes, not college or jobs. The concepts of educational reform and standardized assessment have little meaning for them; they are among the most costly to educate and the least understood.

Donovan recognizes familiar voices, and can mimic their intonations. He communicates some needs; at lunch, he pulls off his bib to show when he is finished. When happy, he sings fragmented notes, his scratchy voice rising in triplets and quads.

But he cannot walk, does not speak and cannot feed himself or see much beyond shapes and shadows. On standardized assessments, he has trouble with tasks most children master in infancy, like opening and closing his eyes on command. Occupied much of the time by his own inner world, he does not respond consistently to his own name.

One year before he is to leave the school system, educating Donovan remains a search for ways to reach him.

A Question of Goals

Donovan’s mother, Michelle Forde, likes his special education high school, Public School 79, the Horan School, in East Harlem, where she feels he is welcome and cared for. But she wishes his teachers would spend more time working on his practical challenges, like his self-abusive habit of hitting himself in the face so hard that he has to wear thick white cotton mitts most of the time, even when he sleeps.

Instead of having him work on basic academic goals, like identifying shapes and coins, she wishes he had physical therapy more than 30 minutes, twice a week, because it is generally the only time during the day he is taken out of his wheelchair, except when an aide takes him to the bathroom to change him.

Rebecca Bravo, the principal of P.S. 79 and the mother of a 38-year-old severely disabled daughter, says that those things are important, but she also has broader aims. For example, Donovan will never be able to prepare breakfast, but he should be allowed to help stir a pot in cooking class, even if an aide must move his hand. He might not be able to call 911, but if he learns about firefighters in social studies, he might be able to recognize a siren when he hears one.

Ms. Bravo does not want to go back to the days when students like Donovan were given only art and music instruction, along with a narrow focus on practical skills.

“For too long, that’s where we kept them, in art and music, and we didn’t give them some of the other things they needed,” she said.

P.S. 79, following city and state mandates, has been moving toward more academic instruction for years. This year, her last before retirement, Ms. Bravo decided to add a twist.

Not only would she teach her severely disabled students adapted versions of science, social studies, English and math, but they would also switch classes almost every 50 minutes instead of remaining with the same teacher. The different environments would be stimulating, she reasoned, and give them a high school experience more like that of their general education peers.

The day starts at 8 a.m. The first hour is spent in the cafeteria, eating breakfast and waiting for children to arrive on dozens of buses from throughout the city.

Painted with colorful murals, the hallways bustle with activity. Upstairs are special classes for students with emotional disturbance, autism or learning disabilities. Some 170 adults — aides, therapists, teachers and administrators — work with 319 students. In 2009, the cost per student was $58,877, more than triple the citywide average of $17,696.

It is a Tuesday in late February, and Donovan’s first class is adaptive physical education. A line of teacher’s aides wheels and walks the students to a classroom that has primary-colored mats along one wall, as well as a few balls, cones and a floor-based basketball net.

“We are in GYM,” the teacher, Kenneth Toron, announces in a circus performer voice, slurring his words somewhat because his left side is partially paralyzed from a stroke. As a visual clue, he holds up a simple line drawing of a basketball and a net known as a Mayer-Johnson symbol. “We are going to EXERCISE.”

Mr. Toron sets up a few cones on the floor and starts up a music playlist on the classroom computer. “Surfin’ U.S.A.” by the Beach Boys is first up. The more advanced students begin walking, some hesitantly, others easily, around the cones.

Some students in Donovan’s classes are able to speak, master vocabulary, socialize and walk, and others appear to attend to even less than he does, engaging in near-constant self-stimulating behaviors, like repetitive jaw chomping, collapsing to the floor during class or reciting many times an hour descending notes that resemble a sad bird call. Ms. Bravo believes in mixing students with multiple disabilities of varying severity so they can learn from one another.

Donovan remains in his wheelchair, moving his head slightly back and forth to the music, his legs crossed at the knees.

A soft ball covered with yellow tape dangles from a rope in front of his wheelchair. A few times during the class, Mr. Toron walks over and gives the ball a tap into Donovan’s line of vision. Donovan swipes the ball weakly out of his way with his ungloved right hand, nodding his head in time to the music. Anissia Mack, Donovan’s one-to-one aide, stands nearby; she occasionally jangles the ball.

Aides lift another student, Darius Jenkins, 15, out of his wheelchair and place him on an inclined plane, where he lies quivering and drooling slightly for most of the class. He is given a squeeze ball to hold several times, but each time, he drops it.

Donovan looks as though he is resting, but when Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” comes on, he smiles and raises his chin. From the back of his throat, he sings a few rough, wordless refrains that loosely follow the beat.

Next, it is off to science. Mr. Torres, a first-year teacher, uses all of his creativity to adapt the lessons, writing his own books, using symbols, pictures and words. He circulates around the room, asking students to identify the vocabulary.

“Which is the fruit?” he asks an intense young student named Isatou, presenting her with a set of two electronic buttons, one marked with a fruit picture, the other with a seed.

Sitting on her own, she presses the correct image, evoking the words “fruit, las frutas” from the button. “Good job,” Mr. Torres said.

Working with the apple and the seeds, Ms. Mack, who is in charge of most of Donovan’s repetition and drilling, marks his responses on a worksheet. “As far as what he’s retaining, I couldn’t tell you,” Ms. Mack said later. She has worked with him for two years, assigned to him because he is prone to seizures, and said the main change she had noticed was that he seemed calmer. “But I do think he appreciates getting an education,” she said.
 

‘Something’s Happened’

Donovan was born healthy, except for clubbed feet. An operation to correct them had been scheduled when, on Aug. 15, 1990, Ms. Forde left Donovan, nearly 6 months old, with his father while she went to work cleaning offices at night.

She felt uneasy all evening, and when she returned to her parents’ house at 1 a.m., her father told her, “Something’s happened to the baby.”

Ms. Forde, then 18, found Donovan unconscious in the hospital, his head in a bandage. His father had been on the street and returned home to get a baby bottle, he told her, leaving Donovan in the arms of a female friend. An under-age driver in a stolen car hit them as they stood near Avenue I and East 23rd Street in Brooklyn.

The friend’s leg was broken, and Donovan landed on his head on the pavement so hard that his heart stopped. A bystander gave him mouth-to-mouth, reviving him before the ambulance came.

For six weeks Donovan remained in a coma, the swelling in his head damaging his optic nerves before a shunt was placed to drain the fluid. After a few months at a rehabilitation center upstate, he came home, forever changed.

His habit of hitting himself started when he was about 5, the same age when he began attending public school, leaving a Helen Keller early intervention program for the blind. Ms. Forde struggled to care for him while getting her bachelor’s degree and working; she and his father split, and despite various attempts, she received no settlement for the accident.

At home, she tried to stimulate him by constantly playing music, especially R&B. She thinks that when he sings, he remembers nursery rhymes he had heard as a baby, his intermittent “ba ba” a remnant of “Baa Baa Black Sheep.”

“He only knows sitting up and making noises, because he was only 5 months old,” she said of his current skills. But though he seemed frozen in infancy in some ways, his bad habits worsened. At elementary school in Coney Island, Donovan twice knocked out one of his teeth, arriving home with them in a bag. At home, he began reaching into his diaper and spreading around the mess.

Pregnant with her second child, and unable to afford private care, Ms. Forde made the wrenching decision nine years ago to move him to the nursing facility at Coler-Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island, where he would get 24-hour attention and Medicaid would foot the bill. He still lives there today, sleeping in a high-walled bed in a room he shares with three other severely disabled youths.

A Plan, but Little Progress

Donovan’s individual education plan paints a picture of what he is expected to learn at P.S. 79.

By November, it says, he will identify directional concepts like top and bottom, left and right with 100 percent accuracy. He will identify four United States coins and common shapes with 100 percent accuracy. He will communicate a message, a desire or need, using an electronic button or tactile icon, five times a day. The problem is that after 15 years of education, he has not learned how to do most of those things reliably.

“Donovan has not yet demonstrated consistent functional communication to indicate purposeful needs,” his plan states.

“I don’t think he can identify shapes,” his mother said, calling the plan unrealistic. “He’s not identifying anything; he just is thinking, ‘O.K., you have something in front of me — what do you want me to do?’ ” Because they need intensive interventions, students like Donovan do not fit neatly into the paradigm for special education that has prevailed in the United States for more than a decade: inclusion. Congress ranks each state for its success in moving special education children into general education classrooms, addressing a core concern in the field — that too many children are not getting access to the regular curriculum.

But whether Donovan is best served in an academic-focused classroom is an uncomfortable question for many educators, because few better options are available, and inclusion “indicates a level of hope for parents, and the absence of hope is deadly,” said David Rose, the founder of CAST, a national organization that works to expand learning opportunities for students with disabilities.

“It’s an awkward period,” Mr. Rose said, in talking about the education of children with the most severe cognitive disabilities. “Because we know what we are doing is not right, and we often don’t talk about things when we don’t know what we are doing about them yet.”

Following federal No Child Left Behind guidelines, New York State standards, even for assessments of the kind Donovan takes, are framed around academic skills. Schools choose the test subjects from a state list that includes items like number awareness, basic geometry and distinguishing living from nonliving things.

Of the 1 percent of students statewide who take such assessments, about 90 percent score at a proficient or advanced level, limiting their usefulness as an accountability standard, said Rebecca H. Cort, the state deputy commissioner for special education. “It’s a problem,” she said.

But despite her son’s lack of academic progress, Ms. Forde is not dissatisfied. She is grateful that her son goes to school like a regular student, and says that he seems happy most of the time. “The only goal I had for him was when he was in the hospital after the accident, when the nurse told me he wasn’t going to live,” she said. “He’s here, and he’s 20 years old. So he surpassed his goal. He’s alive.”

A Resonant Connection

There are glimmers that greater communication and interaction with other people, a momentous goal for a student like Donovan, are possible.

One day in late March, Donovan sat alone in the cafeteria before dismissal, moving his head from side to side as if discerning rhythms from the busy room around him. He smiled as if he were remembering a secret. “Who is that, Ray Charles?” said Roosevelt Adams, gesturing across the room at Donovan. “Or Stevie Wonder?”

A tall, rangy man with 26 years on the job as a teacher’s aide at P.S. 79 (or, as he prefers to be known, an educational assistant), Mr. Adams holds in his mind a kind of Rosetta stone to Donovan’s physical language. “That’s his happy mood,” he said.

Donovan’s communications are hard to measure on assessments, and there is no glossary of them posted for teachers to see. So not everyone knows that a head butt, according to Mr. Adams, is how Donovan says no when he gets angry. Or that when Donovan does not want something, he turns his head. When he wants something, “he lets you give it to him,” Mr. Adams said, adding that when his head is down, “that’s his low.”

Mr. Adams was Donovan’s one-to-one aide for four years before Ms. Mack took over two years ago. It is an intimate position to be in; from nearly the moment Donovan gets off the bus to the moment he leaves, the aide feeds him, quizzes him, reads to him, changes him (if the aide is the same gender) and wakes him up when he is dozing.

Besides physical therapy at P.S. 79, Donovan receives an hour each of occupational and speech therapy each week, and a half-hour of vision therapy. His classroom teachers must divide their time with 11 other students with multiple disabilities. So more than anyone else at P.S. 79, the teacher’s aides may have the best shot at providing the intensive one-on-one time that many experts say it takes to make progress with a student like Donovan.

They are also among the lowest paid people in the system, earning between $21,000 and $36,000 a year, and requiring no specific training in special education beyond what they learn on the job.

Donovan’s love for music requires no translation. He sings in fragmented high-pitched tones, or in throaty notes that blossom into rhythmic phrases. But Mr. Adams got him to achieve more.

By getting Donovan into a really happy mood, by tickling him or giving him a head rub, he found he could get him to sing “Old MacDonald” with him. And though he does not speak, Donovan managed the “Old Mac” and then — his favorite part — a loud “E-I-E-I-O.”

“Singing, that’s a form of talking,” Mr. Adams said, adding that Donovan reminded him of his mother and brother, both of whom were blind. “He understands very well, quite as much as you and I do. If he could talk, and he could see, he could express himself a little bit better.”

Without knowing it, Mr. Adams’s efforts had touched on recent research in educating severely disabled children that focuses on using emotion and human connection to reach them. As higher functioning areas of their brains are underdeveloped, emotion moves them at a deeper level, lighting up the same part of their brain, the limbic system, as meaningful music, and possibly creating a bridge to greater intellectual cognition.

“We are so focused on teaching them skills, we don’t focus on the emotional part of the child,” said Rosanne K. Silberman, who coordinates graduate teacher preparation programs in severe disabilities and blindness at Hunter College. “You want them to be happy. You want to be about working on showing this kid that he’s a worthwhile human being.”

Since Mr. Adams was reassigned to other students, Donovan no longer sings “Old MacDonald,” aides in his class said. He also appears to have forgotten how to indicate, with a nod, which is more: one marker tapped against his arm or two, said Sharon Naftali, his former classroom teacher who works with him in a yoga class. “It wasn’t practiced,” she said.

But Ms. Bravo said she believed exposing Donovan to change would help him be more flexible in the face of whatever lay ahead for him, likely a residential day program where he will get less one-on-one support than he does now. His therapies are starting to be scaled back in preparation for the transition.

“We find that very often we do a disservice to our kids when they come to depend on just one person,” she said.

A Year to Go

Donovan is the only legally blind student in his class, and when teachers take that into account, he comes alive. One Thursday afternoon, Timothy Carton, his English teacher, filled his brightly colored classroom with choruses of bird calls, the chirps of cardinals and blue jays causing Donovan to sing back. An interactive smart board narrated a simple story.

“Donovan, this is the big nest,” Mr. Carton explained in a bright tone, holding a handmade nest of twigs next to Donovan’s hand. “It’s round. It goes round and round and round. And in the middle is the bird,” he said, putting a chirping red plastic cardinal in his hand. “Can you feel the bird? Can you pick the bird up? The bird flies around, and you put the bird back in its nest.” He put his hand over Donovan’s to guide him through the motions.

But in math class, Donovan was unable, as were most of his classmates, to distinguish a dollar from a quarter, or participate in an exercise in which he was told it would cost $1 to buy a plastic model of French fries and 25 cents for a plastic toy version of a doughnut. An aide working with him and another student could not get a clear response, and after a few minutes, stopped trying.

One morning in mid-March, there was an accomplishment. In a modified yoga class called Getting Ready to Learn, Donovan’s vision teacher slipped off both of his gloves and spent time massaging his stiff arms, which tend to stay bent at right angles. Calmed, he was able to keep them off for the rest of the day.

“If I have one issue with the Department of Education, it’s that one size doesn’t fit all,” said Barbara Levine, the vision teacher, who has worked in city special education schools for 25 years and who wants Donovan to have a music class.

“What I’m seeing is that what they are doing is a great fit for 15 to 20 percent of the kids, and the rest of them, we go well over their heads,” she said.

Ms. Bravo said her goal was to strike a balance between functional and academic instruction, focusing on what is really important: the skills that Donovan will need to help communicate to caregivers in the years ahead. Whether that actually took place, she said, will be looked at.

She is retiring this year, but will recommend that the school scale back its class-switching experiment next year, Donovan’s last. Although the teachers and many of the students seemed to relish the dynamism of the curriculum, it proved too much for a single teacher to learn the individual learning styles of dozens of highly challenged students.

But Ms. Bravo is confident the school is moving in the right direction. “I believe we are a special place,” she said. “Are we perfect? No. But no place is.”

    Schools Struggle to Educate the Severely Disabled, NYT, 19.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/education/20donovan.html

Salutes for Graduates Who’ll Be Saluting Soon

June 16, 2010
The New York Times
By WINNIE HU

PHILADELPHIA — The valedictorians stood out with their bronze medals, and the honor-society members wore turquoise stoles and decorative cords to mark their successes at Cherry Hill High School West in New Jersey.

But it was three serious-looking young men in plain purple robes who were asked to stand midway through their graduation ceremony here at Temple University on Wednesday afternoon, as the school’s principal, Joseph Meloche, announced their names and future plans.

Abner Alcontin: United States Air Force. Keith Mailahn: United States Army. Robert Pennington: Air Force.

“Thank you gentlemen, on behalf of everyone here, for your dedication, commitment and willingness to serve,” Mr. Meloche told them, as their classmates and families clapped loudly.

High schools across the nation are saluting students who opt for boot camp over freshman orientation, rewriting graduation traditions in suburban communities like Cherry Hill. These military recruits, long overshadowed by their Ivy League-bound classmates, are being given a place of honor alongside the valedictorians and scholars.

“Everybody’s going to know who we are, and I’m going to feel more appreciated even by people who don’t know me,” said Mr. Mailahn, 18. “Even though some of us may not be the brightest students, we’re still doing something with our lives. When we’re signing those papers, we’re putting our lives on the line.”

Bethel Park High School, outside of Pittsburgh, awarded diplomas this month to its eight enlisted students before everyone else.

The Lenape regional district in New Jersey started a new awards ceremony for those joining the armed services, and on Long Island, Longwood High School has created a “wall of honor” with plaques dedicated to recent graduates and alumni on active duty; there are 52 so far.

In Oregon and Washington State, 237 seniors started a new tradition of wearing honor cords of black and gold at their graduation ceremonies to signify their Army future.

And across Illinois, dozens of schools have signed on to a campaign to honor enlisted students at graduation that is supported by the state’s principals association and political leaders.

“I think we’re finally starting to get it,” said Zeb Jansante, principal of Bethel Park. “In the past, it’s not been honored as it should have been. As a school, we’re an academic institution by and large and we don’t see the military as a next step.”

But some parents and antiwar groups have questioned the special recognition, saying that public schools should not be singling out any particular career path or appear to be endorsing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I think it glamorizes it in the same way that a lot of recruiting materials glamorize serving in the military,” said Kimber Heinz, national organizing coordinator for the War Resisters League. “It’s seen as really cool, but it doesn’t show the reality of war.”

In a country that has been at war for nearly nine years, principals and students at highly regarded suburban schools say that interest has been growing in the military — and not just in West Point and the other academies that traditionally attract top students.

They say that the enlisted ranks give many more students a chance to show their patriotism, gain experience in specialized fields and technologies, and receive a loan-free college education through an expanded G.I. Bill.

The Department of Defense said that about 76,000 high school graduates between the ages of 17 and 19 had reported for active duty in 2008, the most recent year available, falling from 80,000 in 2006.

Most high schools have no more than a few enlisted students, particularly in high-performing districts where, some officials say, joining the military has sometimes been seen as a step below enrolling in community college.

Indeed, military recruiting is often discouraged because it could lower a school’s college-acceptance rate — a highly prized statistic that can be linked to real estate values.

“There are lots of communities where that’s the measuring stick of success,” said Dick Flanary, a senior director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. “We need to recognize that every kid is not going to college.”

Jade Bates, 18, who is joining the Air Force, said she felt largely overlooked at Audubon High School in New Jersey as her classmates went first to college fairs and then to banquets for academic and athletic achievements.

“I’m an average student but I’m doing something, and I think more students going to the military should be recognized,” she said. “A lot of times, we really do get brushed aside. I’ve felt really left out, and unappreciated, and not even there.”

Kenneth E. Hartman, an administrator at Drexel University who is an Army veteran, said that he started a volunteer group, Our Community Salutes, last year to honor enlisted students and their families because so many high schools did not. His group has raised more than $25,000 to hold an annual banquet for military-bound seniors and their parents in South Jersey.

A similar effort started in Pittsburgh this year.

“I went around with a tin cup in hand, and not one person turned me down,” Dr. Hartman said. “This is a different type of graduate who deserves the support and gratitude of our entire community.”

Dr. Hartman, a parent and former school board member in Cherry Hill, also pushed his own district to recognize enlisted students at its graduation ceremonies. Cherry Hill High School East will honor four enlisted graduates at its ceremony Thursday, including Jerome Epps, who said he was a C student who would not otherwise be singled out.

“I believe that most kids think going to the military is the easy way out and you don’t have to work as hard as the kids going straight to college,” he said. “They don’t know what the military involves exactly.”

Before Wednesday’s ceremony here, Mr. Mailahn stood with his fellow enlistees, and looked around at his classmates, many of whom were busy tweaking their honor stoles and cords.

“I feel different because they’re still going to school and I’m starting my career,” he said. “I feel good about myself.”

    Salutes for Graduates Who’ll Be Saluting Soon, NYT, 16.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/education/17enlist.html

Plan B: Skip College

May 14, 2010
The New York Times
By JACQUES STEINBERG

WHAT’S the key to success in the United States?

Short of becoming a reality TV star, the answer is rote and, some would argue, rather knee-jerk: Earn a college degree.

The idea that four years of higher education will translate into a better job, higher earnings and a happier life — a refrain sure to be repeated this month at graduation ceremonies across the country — has been pounded into the heads of schoolchildren, parents and educators. But there’s an underside to that conventional wisdom. Perhaps no more than half of those who began a four-year bachelor’s degree program in the fall of 2006 will get that degree within six years, according to the latest projections from the Department of Education. (The figures don’t include transfer students, who aren’t tracked.)

For college students who ranked among the bottom quarter of their high school classes, the numbers are even more stark: 80 percent will probably never get a bachelor’s degree or even a two-year associate’s degree.

That can be a lot of tuition to pay, without a degree to show for it.

A small but influential group of economists and educators is pushing another pathway: for some students, no college at all. It’s time, they say, to develop credible alternatives for students unlikely to be successful pursuing a higher degree, or who may not be ready to do so.

Whether everyone in college needs to be there is not a new question; the subject has been hashed out in books and dissertations for years. But the economic crisis has sharpened that focus, as financially struggling states cut aid to higher education.

Among those calling for such alternatives are the economists Richard K. Vedder of Ohio University and Robert I. Lerman of American University, the political scientist Charles Murray, and James E. Rosenbaum, an education professor at Northwestern. They would steer some students toward intensive, short-term vocational and career training, through expanded high school programs and corporate apprenticeships.

“It is true that we need more nanosurgeons than we did 10 to 15 years ago,” said Professor Vedder, founder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a research nonprofit in Washington. “But the numbers are still relatively small compared to the numbers of nurses’ aides we’re going to need. We will need hundreds of thousands of them over the next decade.”

And much of their training, he added, might be feasible outside the college setting.

College degrees are simply not necessary for many jobs. Of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Among the top 10 growing job categories, two require college degrees: accounting (a bachelor’s) and postsecondary teachers (a doctorate). But this growth is expected to be dwarfed by the need for registered nurses, home health aides, customer service representatives and store clerks. None of those jobs require a bachelor’s degree.

Professor Vedder likes to ask why 15 percent of mail carriers have bachelor’s degrees, according to a 1999 federal study.

“Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education,” he said.

Professor Lerman, the American University economist, said some high school graduates would be better served by being taught how to behave and communicate in the workplace.

Such skills are ranked among the most desired — even ahead of educational attainment — in many surveys of employers. In one 2008 survey of more than 2,000 businesses in Washington State, employers said entry-level workers appeared to be most deficient in being able to “solve problems and make decisions,” “resolve conflict and negotiate,” “cooperate with others” and “listen actively.”

Yet despite the need, vocational programs, which might teach such skills, have been one casualty in the push for national education standards, which has been focused on preparing students for college.

While some educators propose a radical renovation of the community college system to teach work readiness, Professor Lerman advocates a significant national investment by government and employers in on-the-job apprenticeship training. He spoke with admiration, for example, about a program in the CVS pharmacy chain in which aspiring pharmacists’ assistants work as apprentices in hundreds of stores, with many going on to study to become full-fledged pharmacists themselves.

“The health field is an obvious case where the manpower situation is less than ideal,” he said. “I would try to work with some of the major employers to develop these kinds of programs to yield mastery in jobs that do demand high expertise.”

While no country has a perfect model for such programs, Professor Lerman pointed to a modest study of a German effort done last summer by an intern from that country. She found that of those who passed the Abitur, the exam that allows some Germans to attend college for almost no tuition, 40 percent chose to go into apprenticeships in trades, accounting, sales management, and computers.

“Some of the people coming out of those apprenticeships are in more demand than college graduates,” he said, “because they’ve actually managed things in the workplace.”

Still, by urging that some students be directed away from four-year colleges, academics like Professor Lerman are touching a third rail of the education system. At the very least, they could be accused of lowering expectations for some students. Some critics go further, suggesting that the approach amounts to educational redlining, since many of the students who drop out of college are black or non-white Hispanics.

Peggy Williams, a counselor at a high school in suburban New York City with a student body that is mostly black or Hispanic, understands the argument for erring on the side of pushing more students toward college.

“If we’re telling kids, ‘You can’t cut the mustard, you shouldn’t go to college or university,’ then we’re shortchanging them from experiencing an environment in which they might grow,” she said.

But Ms. Williams said she would be more willing to counsel some students away from the precollege track if her school, Mount Vernon High School, had a better vocational education alternative. Over the last decade, she said, courses in culinary arts, nursing, dentistry and heating and ventilation system repair were eliminated. Perhaps 1 percent of this year’s graduates will complete a concentration in vocational courses, she said, compared with 40 percent a decade ago.

There is another rejoinder to the case against college: People with college and graduate degrees generally earn more than those without them, and face lower risks of unemployment, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Even those who experience a few years of college earn more money, on average, with less risk of unemployment, than those who merely graduate from high school, said Morton Schapiro, an economist who is the president of Northwestern University.

“You get some return even if you don’t get the sheepskin,” Mr. Schapiro said.

He warned against overlooking the intangible benefits of a college experience — even an incomplete experience — for those who might not apply what they learned directly to their chosen work.

“It’s not just about the economic return,” he said. “Some college, whether you complete it or not, contributes to aesthetic appreciation, better health and better voting behavior.”

Nonetheless, Professor Rosenbaum said, high school counselors and teachers are not doing enough to alert students unlikely to earn a college degree to the perilous road ahead.

“I’m not saying don’t get the B.A,” he said. “I’m saying, let’s get them some intervening credentials, some intervening milestones. Then, if they want to go further in their education, they can.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 23, 2010


Because of an editing error, an article last Sunday exploring whether college is the right path for everyone misspelled, at one point, the surname of the president of Northwestern University, who said that a few years of college can be valuable, even if no degree is earned. As the article noted elsewhere, he is Morton Schapiro, not Shapiro.

    Plan B: Skip College, NYT, 14.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/weekinreview/16steinberg.html

9 Teenagers Are Charged After Classmate’s Suicide

March 29, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM and KATIE ZEZIMA

It is not clear what some students at South Hadley High School expected to achieve by subjecting a freshman to the relentless taunting described by a prosecutor and classmates.

Certainly not her suicide. And certainly not the multiple felony indictments announced on Monday against several students at the Massachusetts school.

The prosecutor brought charges Monday against nine teenagers, saying their taunting and physical threats were beyond the pale and led the freshman, Phoebe Prince, to hang herself from a stairwell in January.

The charges were an unusually sharp legal response to the problem of adolescent bullying, which is increasingly conducted in cyberspace as well as in the schoolyard and has drawn growing concern from parents, educators and lawmakers.

In the uproar around the suicides of Ms. Prince, 15, and an 11-year-old boy subjected to harassment in nearby Springfield last year, the Massachusetts legislature stepped up work on an anti-bullying law that is now near passage. The law would require school staff members to report suspected incidents and principals to investigate them. It would also demand that schools teach about the dangers of bullying. Forty-one other states have anti-bullying laws of varying strength.

In the Prince case, two boys and four girls, ages 16 to 18, face a different mix of felony charges that include statutory rape, violation of civil rights with bodily injury, harassment, stalking and disturbing a school assembly. Three younger girls have been charged in juvenile court, Elizabeth D. Scheibel, the Northwestern district attorney, said at a news conference in Northampton, Mass.

Appearing with state and local police officials on Monday, Ms. Scheibel said that Ms. Prince’s suicide came after nearly three months of severe taunting and physical threats by a cluster of fellow students.

“The investigation revealed relentless activities directed toward Phoebe to make it impossible for her to stay at school,” Ms. Scheibel said. The conduct of those charged, she said, “far exceeded the limits of normal teenage relationship-related quarrels.”

It was particularly alarming, the district attorney said, that some teachers, administrators and other staff members at the school were aware of the harassment but did not stop it. “The actions or inactions of some adults at the school were troublesome,” Ms. Scheibel said, but did not violate any laws.

Christine Swelko, assistant superintendent for South Hadley Public Schools, said school officials planned to meet with the district attorney this week or next. “We will then review this evidence and particularly the new information which the district attorney’s office has but did not come to light within the investigation conducted by the school,” Ms. Swelko said in a statement.

Ms. Prince’s family had recently moved to the United States from a small town in Ireland, and she entered South Hadley last fall. The taunting started when she had a brief relationship with a popular senior boy; some students reportedly called her an “Irish slut,” knocked books out of her hands and sent her threatening text messages, day after day.

At South Hadley High School, which has about 700 students, most students and teachers refused on Monday to talk about the case. Students waited for parents in the pouring rain and a sports team ran by, with one student telling reporters, “Go away.”

Ashlee Dunn, a 16-year-old sophomore, said she had not known Ms. Prince personally but had heard stories spread about her in the hallways.

“She was new and she was from a different country, and she didn’t really know the school very well,” Ms. Dunn said. “I think that’s probably one reason why they chose Phoebe.”

On Jan. 14, the investigation found, students abused her in the school library, the lunchroom and the hallways and threw a canned drink at her as she walked home. Her sister found her hanging from a stairwell at home, still in her school clothes, at 4:30 p.m.

Some of the students plotted against Ms. Prince on the Internet, using social networking sites, but the main abuse was at school, the prosecutor said.

“The actions of these students were primarily conducted on school grounds during school hours and while school was in session,” Ms. Scheibel said.

Ms. Scheibel declined to provide details about the charges of statutory rape against two boys, but experts said those charges could mean that the boys had sex with Ms. Prince when she was under age.

Legal experts said they were not aware of other cases in which students faced serious criminal charges for harassing a fellow student, but added that the circumstances in this case appeared to be extreme and that juvenile charges were usually kept private.

The Massachusetts House and Senate have passed versions of an anti-bullying law, but disagreement remains on whether all schools will be required to conduct staff training about bullying — a provision in about half the states with such laws and one that is vital, said Robert O. Trestan, Eastern States Civil Rights Counsel of the Anti-Defamation League, which has led the effort for legislation in Massachusetts.

The prospective law, Mr. Trestan said, is aimed at changing school cultures and preventing bullying, but would not label bullying a crime because it is a vague concept. “These indictments tell us that middle school and high school kids are not immune from criminal laws,” he said. “If they violate them in the course of bullying someone, they’ll be held accountable. We don’t need to create a new crime.”

A South Hadley parent, Mitch Brouillard, who said his daughter Rebecca had been bullied by one of the girls charged in Ms. Prince’s death, said he was pleased that charges were brought. One of the students was charged separately in a case involving his daughter.

“My daughter was bullied for three years, and we continually went to the administration and we really got no satisfaction,” Mr. Brouillard said, adding, “I was offered an apology a few weeks ago that they should have handled it differently.”

The school has convened an anti-bullying task force, which met Monday, to help determine how to deal with bullying. “That’s the really clear message we’re trying to send — if you see anything at all, online, through friends, you have to tell us,” said Bill Evans, an administrator leading a group subcommittee.

The task force must also consider whether state law affects existing procedures. “The big question out there is what the legislature will impose on school districts,” Mr. Evans said.

Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer in Cambridge, Mass., who has argued that proposed cyberbullying laws are too vague and a threat to free speech, said that he thought the charges announced Monday would pass legal muster. The sorts of acts of harassment and stalking claimed in the charges were wrong under state law, Mr. Silverglate said, but a question would be whether they were serious enough to constitute criminal violations, as opposed to civil ones.

“There is a higher threshold of proof of outrageous conduct needed to reach the level of a criminal cause of action, in comparison to the lower level of outrageousness needed to prove a civil violation,” he said.

A lawsuit involving another case of high school bullying, in upstate New York, was settled on Monday. A gay teenager had sued the Mohawk Central School District, saying school officials had not protected him.

In the settlement, the district said it would increase staff training to prevent harassment, pay $50,000 to the boy’s family and reimburse the family for counseling, The Associated Press reported. The boy has moved to a different district.


Erik Eckholm reported from New York, and Katie Zezima from South Hadley, Mass.

    9 Teenagers Are Charged After Classmate’s Suicide, NYT, 30.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/us/30bully.html

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

March 12, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.

In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.

Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

The curriculum standards will now be published in a state register, opening them up for 30 days of public comment. A final vote will be taken in May, but given the Republican dominance of the board, it is unlikely that many changes will be made.

The standards, reviewed every decade, serve as a template for textbook publishers, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books. The board’s makeup will have changed by then because Dr. McLeroy lost in a primary this month to a more moderate Republican, and two others — one Democrat and one conservative Republican — announced they were not seeking re-election.

There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”

They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”

Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.

“Republicans need a little credit for that,” he said. “I think it’s going to surprise some students.”

Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.

Other changes seem aimed at tamping down criticism of the right. Conservatives passed one amendment, for instance, requiring that the history of McCarthyism include “how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government.” The Venona papers were transcripts of some 3,000 communications between the Soviet Union and its agents in the United States.

Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons “the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.”

It was defeated on a party-line vote.

After the vote, Ms. Knight said, “The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.”

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

“Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”

In the field of sociology, another conservative member, Barbara Cargill, won passage of an amendment requiring the teaching of “the importance of personal responsibility for life choices” in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders.

“The topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything,” Ms. Cargill said.

Even the course on world history did not escape the board’s scalpel.

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

“The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Ms. Dunbar said.

    Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change, NYT, 13.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html

Letters

Using Talk and Play to Develop Minds

February 8, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Playing to Learn,” by Susan Engel (Op-Ed, Feb. 2):

I agree that our schools should try to develop our children’s ability to use their minds constructively rather than trying to fill those minds with facts they will never use. But there’s a problem.

It’s hard to test thinking skills, and education needs tests. Without them, it cannot be managed. Teachers cannot tell how well students are doing. Principals cannot tell how well teachers are doing. And governments cannot tell how well schools are doing.

So, until we develop good tests to measure student thinking skills, our schools will probably continue to try to fill their students’ memories with facts. Perhaps the Department of Education could do some constructive thinking about that. Peter Kugel

Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 2, 2010

•

To the Editor:

“Playing to Learn” is simply one of the best opinion articles ever to appear in The New York Times, at least during the 50-plus years I’ve been reading it. It is smart, succinct, powerful and vitally important.

Anybody with authority over elementary school systems, classrooms or children should commit to doing everything needed to put it into effect without delay. Those in authority who don’t agree should tell us why, with substantive explanations, not excuses or fingerpointing. Penn Rhodeen

New Haven, Feb. 2, 2010

The writer, a lawyer, is a lecturer at the Yale Child Study Center.

•

To the Editor:

As a Bank Street College graduate, I agree with many of the points Susan Engel makes in her essay, especially regarding play, literacy, children constructing knowledge, and the importance of collaboration and cooperation. But I fear that much is missing from her proposed curriculum. Her goals are simply too few and too narrow.

Most important: social studies! Where is it?

In addition, in any mathematics curriculum, including early childhood, children are capable of learning much more than the four basic operations. Where are geometry and early algebra? What about logic, measurement and estimation?

Yes, let us make elementary education less tedious and more engaging, but there is no need to constrict the curriculum as drastically as this.

Deborah Dunnell

Alstead, N.H., Feb. 2, 2010

The writer is a retired early childhood educator.

•

To the Editor:

As the debate about education reform rages on, I appreciate Susan Engel’s vision. But I do see some problems with her processes and prescriptions.

A main challenge we face is preparing students for their future. That future includes an increasingly technological workplace where science, technology, engineering and math opportunities will predominate.

The short shrift given math in Ms. Engel’s schema is emblematic of why the United States is lagging behind many countries in math and so many technology jobs are leaving this country.

Curriculum is something that should be developed by teachers, not imposed on them. No one knows a student’s needs better than his or her teacher.

What should be determined from on high is the standards — in other words, what students should know and be able to do. Leave it to the teachers to figure out how to get there. Sam Jones

Westport, Conn., Feb. 3, 2010

The writer is a math teacher.

•

To the Editor:

I agree with Susan Engel’s suggestion that elementary school curriculums should emphasize, among other things, class discussion and verbal expression. Far too often teachers and administrators regard their primary task as managing children as a group, rather than engaging them intellectually as individuals.

The results for intelligent children often include chronic boredom and disdain for the very adults who vaunt their authority.

Educators of young children frequently underestimate, and sometimes seem to fear, their own students’ critical and analytical faculties.

Gregory J. Shibley

North Palm Beach, Fla., Feb. 2, 2010

•

To the Editor:

As an educator and the mother of a child in her final year of elementary school, I found Susan Engel’s essay to be powerful and insightful.

Another crucial area of play about which too many schools forget is time at home. Despite solid research showing that homework in elementary school, apart from reading, offers no benefits and can, in fact, be detrimental, children arrive home exhausted and with too much homework.

They are left with little time to partake in nonacademic activities that are also necessary for their development, much less what we all need and no child should be without: relaxation.

Jennifer Trachtenberg

Wynnewood, Pa., Feb. 2, 2010

The writer is a high school guidance counselor.

•

To the Editor:

In “Playing to Learn,” Susan Engel imagines her ideal third-grade class, in which students spend lots of time reading, writing and playing, and a little time on math. As a third-grade teacher for the past 10 years, I agree that third graders certainly need all of these experiences.

But nowhere does Ms. Engel acknowledge that children universally crave learning about something — whether it’s sharks, World War II, China, fossils or baseball.

Children want and need knowledge of the world they live in, and not just skills.

Miriam Sicherman

Brooklyn, Feb. 2, 2010

    Using Talk and Play to Develop Minds, NYT, 8.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/opinion/l08teach.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Playing to Learn

February 2, 2010
The New York Times
By SUSAN ENGEL

New Marlborough, Mass.

THE Obama administration is planning some big changes to how we measure the success or failure of schools and how we apportion federal money based on those assessments. It’s great that the administration is trying to undertake reforms, but if we want to make sure all children learn, we will need to overhaul the curriculum itself. Our current educational approach — and the testing that is driving it — is completely at odds with what scientists understand about how children develop during the elementary school years and has led to a curriculum that is strangling children and teachers alike.

In order to design a curriculum that teaches what truly matters, educators should remember a basic precept of modern developmental science: developmental precursors don’t always resemble the skill to which they are leading. For example, saying the alphabet does not particularly help children learn to read. But having extended and complex conversations during toddlerhood does. Simply put, what children need to do in elementary school is not to cram for high school or college, but to develop ways of thinking and behaving that will lead to valuable knowledge and skills later on.

So what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.

Imagine, for instance, a third-grade classroom that was free of the laundry list of goals currently harnessing our teachers and students, and that was devoted instead to just a few narrowly defined and deeply focused goals.

In this classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.

Children would also spend an hour a day writing things that have actual meaning to them — stories, newspaper articles, captions for cartoons, letters to one another. People write best when they use writing to think and to communicate, rather than to get a good grade.

In our theoretical classroom, children would also spend a short period of time each day practicing computation — adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. Once children are proficient in those basics they would be free to turn to other activities that are equally essential for math and science: devising original experiments, observing the natural world and counting things, whether they be words, events or people. These are all activities children naturally love, if given a chance to do them in a genuine way.

What they shouldn’t do is spend tedious hours learning isolated mathematical formulas or memorizing sheets of science facts that are unlikely to matter much in the long run. Scientists know that children learn best by putting experiences together in new ways. They construct knowledge; they don’t swallow it.

Along the way, teachers should spend time each day having sustained conversations with small groups of children. Such conversations give children a chance to support their views with evidence, change their minds and use questions as a way to learn more.

During the school day, there should be extended time for play. Research has shown unequivocally that children learn best when they are interested in the material or activity they are learning. Play — from building contraptions to enacting stories to inventing games — can allow children to satisfy their curiosity about the things that interest them in their own way. It can also help them acquire higher-order thinking skills, like generating testable hypotheses, imagining situations from someone else’s perspective and thinking of alternate solutions.

A classroom like this would provide lots of time for children to learn to collaborate with one another, a skill easily as important as math or reading. It takes time and guidance to learn how to get along, to listen to one another and to cooperate. These skills cannot be picked up casually at the corners of the day.

The reforms suggested by the administration on Monday have the potential to help liberate our schools. But they can only do so much. Our success depends on embracing a curriculum focused on essential skills like reading, writing, computation, pattern detection, conversation and collaboration — a curriculum designed to raise children, rather than test scores.

Susan Engel is a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams College.

    Playing to Learn, NYT, 2.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/opinion/02engel.html

Administration Outlines Proposed Changes to ‘No Child’ Law

February 2, 2010
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

The Obama administration outlined on Monday morning some of the proposed changes it would like to make in a sweeping overhaul of President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind. The changes, which are outlined in a document discussing the Department of Education portions of the president’s $3.8 trillion budget for the 2011 fiscal year, include the replacement of the current system for judging schools based on student test scores and the shift toward increased competition in distributing federal education dollars.

The administration is also proposing to eliminate the law’s 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.

In releasing the summary of its budget proposals, the Department of Education said, “the Administration will propose to replace the accountability system established in No Child Left Behind with a new system built around the goal of helping all students graduate high school college- and career-ready.”

Department officials, who love acronyms, have already dubbed the new college- and career-ready goal as “CCR.”

“States would measure school performance and differentiate schools on the basis of progress in getting all subgroups of students on track to CCR, the growth of individual students toward CCR, progress toward closing subgroup achievement gaps, graduation rates (at the high school level) and other measures as appropriate,” the summary said. “Schools that are showing significant improvement,” it said, “would be eligible for recognition and rewards.”

The proposals for changes in the No Child law, the main statute governing the role of the federal government in public schools, would eliminate or rework many of the provisions that teachers’ unions, associations of principals, school boards and other groups have found most objectionable. Yet the administration is not planning to abandon the law’s commitments to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students and to encouraging teacher quality.

Significantly, said educators who have been briefed by administration officials on the proposals, the White House wants to change federal financing formulas so that a portion of the money is awarded based on academic progress, rather than by formulas that apportion money to districts according to their numbers of students, especially poor students. The well-worn formulas for distributing tens of billions of dollars in federal aid have, for decades, been a mainstay of the annual budgeting process in the nation’s 14,000 school districts.

Peter Cunningham, a Department spokesman, said that the administration would solicit input from Congressional leaders of both parties in coming weeks to create legislative language that can attract bipartisan support. .

The changes would have to be approved by Congress, which has been at a stalemate for years over how to change the policy.

Currently the education law requires the nation’s 98,000 public schools to make “adequate yearly progress” as measured by student test scores. Schools that miss their targets in reading and math must offer students the opportunity to transfer to other schools and free after-school tutoring. Schools that repeatedly miss targets face harsher sanctions, which can include staff dismissals and closings. All students are required to be proficient by 2014.

Educators have complained loudly in the eight years since the law was signed that it was branding tens of thousands of schools as failing but not forcing them to change.

The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, foreshadowed the elimination of the 2014 deadline in a September speech, referring to it as a “utopian goal,” and administration officials have since made clear that they want the deadline eliminated. In recent meetings with representatives of education groups, Department of Education officials have said they also want to eliminate the school ratings system built on making “adequate yearly progress” on student test scores.

“They were very clear with us that they would change the metric, dropping adequate yearly progress and basing a new system on another picture of performance based on judging schools in a more nuanced way,” said Bruce Hunter, director of public policy for the American Association of School Administrators, who attended one of the meetings.

The current system issues the equivalent of a pass-fail report card for every school each year, an evaluation that administration officials say fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students.

Instead, under the administration’s proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools.

A new goal, which would replace the 2014 universal proficiency deadline, would be for all students to leave high school “college or career ready.” Currently more than 40 states are collaborating, in an effort coordinated by the National Governors Association and encouraged by the administration, to write common standards defining what it means to be a graduate from high school ready for college or a career.

The new standards will also define what students need to learn in earlier grades to advance successfully toward high school graduation.

The administration has already made its mark on education through Race to the Top, a federal grant program in which 40 states are competing for $4 billion in education money included in last year’s federal stimulus bill. In his State of the Union address, Mr. Obama hailed the results so far of that competition, which has persuaded states from Rhode Island to California to make changes in their education laws. States that prohibit the use of test scores in teacher evaluations, for example, are not eligible for the funds. The competition has also encouraged states to open the door to more charter schools, which receive public money but are run by independent groups.

Now the administration hopes to apply similar conditions to the distribution of the billions of dollars that the Department of Education hands out to states and districts as part of its annual budget.

“They want to recast the law so that it is as close to Race to the Top as they can get it, making the money conditional on districts’ taking action to improve schools,” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, who attended a recent meeting at which administration officials outlined their plans in broad strokes. “Right now most federal money goes out in formulas, so schools know how much they’ll get, and then use it to provide services for poor children. The department thinks that’s become too much of an entitlement. They want to upend that scheme by making states and districts pledge to take actions the administration considers reform, before they get the money.”

“The budget promotes increased competition in awarding Federal education funds, and asks states and school districts for more in return for formula funds,” the department’s 2011 budget summary says.

One section of the current Bush-era law has required states to certify that all teachers are highly qualified, based on their college coursework and state-issued credentials. In the Race to the Top competition, the administration has required participating states to develop the capability to evaluate teachers based on student test data, at least in part, and on whether teachers are successful in raising student achievement.

Educators who have talked to the administration said the officials appeared to be considering inserting similar provisions into the main education law, by requiring the use of student data in teacher evaluation systems as a condition for receiving federal education money. Mr. Duncan has publicly endorsed such an approach, Mr. Cunningham said.

The education law has been praised for focusing attention on achievement gaps, but it has also generated tremendous opposition, especially from educators, who contend that it sets impossible goals for students and schools and humiliates students and educators when they fall short. The law has, to date, labeled some 30,000 schools as “in need of improvement,” a euphemism for failing, but states and districts have done little to change them.

The last serious attempt to rewrite the law was in 2007. That effort collapsed, partly because teachers’ unions and other educator groups opposed an effort to incorporate merit pay provisions into a rewritten law. Earlier this month, Mr. Duncan and more than a dozen other administration officials took steps toward organizing a new rewrite, meeting with the Democratic chairmen and ranking Republican members of the education committees in both houses of Congress.

    Administration Outlines Proposed Changes to ‘No Child’ Law, NYT, 2.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/education/02child.html