History > 2013 > USA > Education (I)

Guns In The Classroom

Bob Englehart

is the staff cartoonist for the Hartford Courant,

and his cartoons are nationally syndicated by Cagle Cartoons.

Cagle

23 January 2013

No Rich Child Left Behind

April 27, 2013
6:15 pm
The New York Times
By SEAN F. REARDON

Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion.

Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.

What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.

One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.

To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.

In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.

In a more recent study, my graduate students and I found that 15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did.

These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.

In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?

We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.

Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore.

The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.

Before we can figure out what’s happening here, let’s dispel a few myths.

The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.

The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decades, trends that actually keep the yawning gap between higher- and lower-income students from getting even wider. If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.

It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school. There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.

If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.

My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.

But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.

High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.

With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more — more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time” — in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.

The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition.

It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.

We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem — a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class — is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I.

We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it.

Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.

We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.

So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.

But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.

This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often.. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.

It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.

The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.

Sean F. Reardon

is a professor of education and sociology at Stanford.

    No Rich Child Left Behind, NYT, 27.4.2013,
    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/

Criminalizing Children at School

April 18, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The National Rifle Association and President Obama responded to the Newtown, Conn., shootings by recommending that more police officers be placed in the nation’s schools. But a growing body of research suggests that, contrary to popular wisdom, a larger police presence in schools generally does little to improve safety. It can also create a repressive environment in which children are arrested or issued summonses for minor misdeeds — like cutting class or talking back — that once would have been dealt with by the principal.

Stationing police in schools, while common today, was virtually unknown during the 1970s. Things began to change with the surge of juvenile crime during the ’80s, followed by an overreaction among school officials. Then came the 1999 Columbine High School shooting outside Denver, which prompted a surge in financing for specially trained police. In the mid-1970s, police patrolled about 1 percent of schools. By 2008, the figure was 40 percent.

The belief that police officers automatically make schools safer was challenged in a 2011 study that compared federal crime data of schools that had police officers with schools that did not. It found that the presence of the officers did not drive down crime. The study — by Chongmin Na of The University of Houston, Clear Lake, and Denise Gottfredson of the University of Maryland — also found that with police in the buildings, routine disciplinary problems began to be treated as criminal justice problems, increasing the likelihood of arrests.

Children as young as 12 have been treated as criminals for shoving matches and even adolescent misconduct like cursing in school. This is worrisome because young people who spend time in adult jails are more likely to have problems with law enforcement later on. Moreover, federal data suggest a pattern of discrimination in the arrests, with black and Hispanic children more likely to be affected than their white peers.

In Texas, civil rights groups filed a federal complaint against the school district in the town of Bryan. The lawyers say African-American students are four times as likely as other students to be charged with misdemeanors, which can carry fines up to $500 and lead to jail time for disrupting class or using foul language.

The criminalization of misbehavior so alarmed the New York City Council that, in 2010, it passed the Student Safety Act, which requires detailed police reports on which students are arrested and why. (Data from the 2011-12 school year show that black students are being disproportionately arrested and suspended.)

Some critics now want to require greater transparency in the reporting process to make the police even more forthcoming. Elsewhere in the country, judges, lawmakers and children’s advocates have been working hard to dismantle what they have begun to call the school-to-prison pipeline.

Given the growing criticism, districts that have gotten along without police officers should think twice before deploying them in school buildings.

    Criminalizing Children at School, NYT, 18.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/criminalizing-children-at-school.html

Scandal in Atlanta

Reignites Debate Over Tests’ Role

April 2, 2013
The New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH

There are few more contentious issues in public education than the increased reliance on standardized testing.

In the context of a fiery debate, the Atlanta school cheating scandal, the largest in recent history, detonates like a bomb, fueling critics who say that standardized testing as a way to measure student achievement should be scaled back.

Evidence of systemic cheating has emerged in as many as a dozen places across the country, and protests in Chicago, New York City, Seattle, across Texas and elsewhere represent a growing backlash among educators and parents against high-stakes testing.

“The widespread cheating and test score manipulation problem,” said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, “is one more example of the ways politicians’ fixation on high-stakes testing is damaging education quality and equity.”

But those who say that testing helps improve the accountability of schools and teachers argue that focusing on the cheating scandals ignores the larger picture.

Abandoning testing would “be equivalent to saying ‘O.K., because there are some players that cheated in Major League Baseball, we should stop keeping score, because that only encourages people to take steroids,’ ” said Thomas J. Kane, director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, who has received funding from the Gates Foundation.

In Atlanta, where some critics say the rampant cheating on state tests invalidates the district’s accomplishments over the past decade, students there showed more growth between 2003 and 2011, as measured by federal education exams, than any other district that participated in the tests, including Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.

Education experts on both sides of the standardized testing debate generally accept these federal exams, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, as the gold standard in measuring genuine student achievement. The federal tests were not implicated in the Atlanta investigation.

No one is defending the cheating in Atlanta, which resulted in the indictments of 35 educators, including the district superintendent. But some education advocates say the scandal, in a district of mostly black and poor children, could detract from a genuine effort to raise the quality of education for some of the neediest students.

“The idea that a superintendent who says, ‘We’ve got to have our kids learning more and I don’t want to hear excuses about your lack of progress’ is somehow a bad thing is, I think, unfortunate,” said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit group that works to close achievement gaps for racial minorities and low-income children. She added that the tests generally evaluated fundamental literacy and math skills. “We do know that kids who don’t know what’s on these very basic tests will not be able to succeed,” Ms. Haycock said.

Much of the objection to standardized testing is related to the use of student scores in evaluating teachers. But many states are adopting systems where test scores are just a part of an educator’s performance review. They are also judged on classroom observations and, in some cases, student surveys.

Still, critics argue that because the tests provide administrators and state education departments with the most convenient way to provide a quick performance snapshot, the tests have warped classrooms by forcing teachers to narrow their focus.

“The curriculum is focused on test drill,” said Melissa McCann Cooper, a seventh-grade English teacher at Murchison Middle School in Austin, Tex., where she said the district dictated a writing program that targeted expository and persuasive essays, because that was what was tested. “I have some very gifted writers who are being shoved into a very narrow kind of writing,” Ms. Cooper said.

There is evidence that teachers who consistently help improve students’ standardized test scores can affect more than immediate academic performance, with students in those classes being likelier to attend college and earn more as adults. Teachers and parents argue, though, that the tests often do not accommodate students who learn differently, or let them demonstrate their knowledge creatively.

What’s more, testing opponents complain that standardized tests do not measure all the skills that students need to succeed in college or in jobs, and can force schools to disregard nontested subjects like art and music.

Such criticism is often loudest in more affluent, high-achieving communities. “If you’re an upper-middle-class parent in Scarscale and you hate standardized testing, you have some reason to hate it,” said Michael J. Petrilli, executive vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group. “It’s probably not doing your kid and your schools a whole lot of good, because these tests are mainly about raising the floor and putting pressure on the lowest-performing schools to do better.”

As for cheating, education advocates say states and districts clearly need to increase security procedures. Matthew M. Chingos, a researcher in the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, points out that states spend about $1.7 billion a year on testing administration, which represents less than half 1 percent of total federal, state and local education spending. He said that states could spend a bit more to hire independent proctors and to make the tests a better measure of learning.

“If we’re worried about teaching to the test and cheating,” Mr. Chingos said, “maybe we want to invest in more high-quality assessments that are worthy of these things that we’re asking of them.”

    Scandal in Atlanta Reignites Debate Over Tests’ Role, NYT, 2.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/education/atlanta-cheating-scandal-reignites-testing-debate.html

The Ivy League Was Another Planet

March 28, 2013
The New York Times
By CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS

LEWISBURG, Pa.

IN 12th grade, my friend Ryan and I were finalists for the Silver State Scholars, a competition to identify the “Top 100” seniors in Nevada. The finalists were flown to Lake Tahoe for two days of interviews. On the plane, Ryan and I met a boy from Las Vegas. Looking to size up the competition, we asked what high school he went to. He said a name we didn’t recognize and added, “It’s a magnet school.” Ryan asked what a magnet school was, and spent the remaining hour incredulously demanding a detailed account of the young man’s educational history: his time abroad, his after-school robotics club, his tutors, his college prep courses.

All educations, we realized then, are not created equal. For Ryan and me, of Pahrump, Nev., just an hour from the city, the Vegas boy was a citizen of a planet we would never visit. What we didn’t know was that there were other, more distant planets that we could not even see. And those planets couldn’t see us, either.

A study released last week by researchers at Harvard and Stanford quantified what everyone in my hometown already knew: even the most talented rural poor kids don’t go to the nation’s best colleges. The vast majority, the study found, do not even try.

For deans of admissions brainstorming what they can do to remedy this, might I suggest: anything.

By the time they’re ready to apply to colleges, most kids from families like mine — poor, rural, no college grads in sight — know of and apply to only those few universities to which they’ve incidentally been exposed. Your J.V. basketball team goes to a clinic at University of Nevada, Las Vegas; you apply to U.N.L.V. Your Amtrak train rolls through San Luis Obispo, Calif.; you go to Cal Poly. I took a Greyhound bus to visit high school friends at the University of Nevada, Reno, and ended up at U.N.R. a year later, in 2003.

If top colleges are looking for a more comprehensive tutorial in recruiting the talented rural poor, they might take a cue from one institution doing a truly stellar job: the military.

I never saw a college rep at Pahrump Valley High, but the military made sure that a stream of alumni flooded back to our school in their uniforms and fresh flattops, urging their old chums to enlist. Those students who did even reasonably well on the Asvab (the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, for readers who went to schools where this test was not so exhaustively administered) were thoroughly hounded by recruiters.

My school did its part, too: it devoted half a day’s class time to making sure every junior took the Asvab. The test was also free, unlike the ACT and SAT, which I had to choose between because I could afford only one registration fee. I chose the ACT and crossed off those colleges that asked for the SAT.

To take the SAT II, I had to go to Las Vegas. My mother left work early one Friday to drive me to my aunt’s house there, so I could sleep over and be at the testing facility by 7:30 on Saturday morning. (Most of my friends didn’t have the luxury of an aunt in the city and instead set their alarms for 4:30.) When I cracked the test booklet, I realized that in registering for the exam with no guidance, I’d signed up for the wrong subject — Mathematics Level 2, though I’d barely made it out of algebra alive. Even if I had had the money to retake the test, I wouldn’t have had another ride to Vegas. So I struggled through it and said goodbye to those colleges that required the SAT II.

But the most important thing the military did was walk kids and their families through the enlistment process.

Most parents like mine, who had never gone to college, were either intimidated or oblivious (and sometimes outright hostile) to the intricacies of college admissions and financial aid. I had no idea what I was doing when I applied. Once, I’d heard a volleyball coach mention paying off her student loans, and this led me to assume that college was like a restaurant — you paid when you were done. When I realized I needed my mom’s and my stepfather’s income information and tax documents, they refused to give them to me. They were, I think, ashamed.

Eventually, I just stole the documents and forged their signatures. (Like nearly every one of the dozen or so kids who went on to college from my class at P.V.H.S., I paid for it with the $10,000 Nevada Millennium Scholarship, financed by Nevada’s share of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.)

Granted, there’s a good reason top colleges aren’t sending recruiters around the country to woo kids like me and Ryan (who, incidentally, got his B.S. at U.N.R. before going on to earn his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Purdue and now holds a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship with the National Research Council). The Army needs every qualified candidate it can get, while competitive colleges have far more applicants than they can handle. But if these colleges are truly committed to diversity, they have to start paying attention to the rural poor.

Until then, is it any wonder that students in Pahrump and throughout rural America are more likely to end up in Afghanistan than at N.Y.U.?

Claire Vaye Watkins, an assistant professor of English at Bucknell,

is the author of the short story collection “Battleborn.”

    The Ivy League Was Another Planet, NYT, 28.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/opinion/elite-colleges-are-as-foreign-as-mars.html

Better Colleges Failing to Lure Talented Poor

March 16, 2013
The New York Times
By DAVID LEONHARDT

Most low-income students who have top test scores and grades do not even apply to the nation’s best colleges, according to a new analysis of every high school student who took the SAT in a recent year.

The pattern contributes to widening economic inequality and low levels of mobility in this country, economists say, because college graduates earn so much more on average than nongraduates do. Low-income students who excel in high school often do not graduate from the less selective colleges they attend.

Only 34 percent of high-achieving high school seniors in the bottom fourth of income distribution attended any one of the country’s 238 most selective colleges, according to the analysis, conducted by Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard, two longtime education researchers. Among top students in the highest income quartile, that figure was 78 percent.

The findings underscore that elite public and private colleges, despite a stated desire to recruit an economically diverse group of students, have largely failed to do so.

Many top low-income students instead attend community colleges or four-year institutions closer to their homes, the study found. The students often are unaware of the amount of financial aid available or simply do not consider a top college because they have never met someone who attended one, according to the study’s authors, other experts and high school guidance counselors.

“A lot of low-income and middle-income students have the inclination to stay local, at known colleges, which is understandable when you think about it,” said George Moran, a guidance counselor at Central Magnet High School in Bridgeport, Conn. “They didn’t have any other examples, any models — who’s ever heard of Bowdoin College?”

Whatever the reasons, the choice frequently has major consequences. The colleges that most low-income students attend have fewer resources and lower graduation rates than selective colleges, and many students who attend a local college do not graduate. Those who do graduate can miss out on the career opportunities that top colleges offer.

The new study is beginning to receive attention among scholars and college officials because it is more comprehensive than other research on college choices. The study suggests that the problems, and the opportunities, for low-income students are larger than previously thought.

“It’s pretty close to unimpeachable — they’re drawing on a national sample,” said Tom Parker, the dean of admissions at Amherst College, which has aggressively recruited poor and middle-class students in recent years. That so many high-achieving, lower-income students exist “is a very important realization,” Mr. Parker said, and he suggested that colleges should become more creative in persuading them to apply.

Top low-income students in the nation’s 15 largest metropolitan areas do often apply to selective colleges, according to the study, which was based on test scores, self-reported data, and census and other data for the high school class of 2008. But such students from smaller metropolitan areas — like Bridgeport; Memphis; Sacramento; Toledo, Ohio; and Tulsa, Okla. — and rural areas typically do not.

These students, Ms. Hoxby said, “lack exposure to people who say there is a difference among colleges.”

Elite colleges may soon face more pressure to recruit poor and middle-class students, if the Supreme Court restricts race-based affirmative action. A ruling in the case, involving the University of Texas, is expected sometime before late June.

Colleges currently give little or no advantage in the admissions process to low-income students, compared with more affluent students of the same race, other research has found. A broad ruling against the University of Texas affirmative action program could cause colleges to take into account various socioeconomic measures, including income, neighborhood and family composition. Such a step would require an increase in these colleges’ financial aid spending but would help them enroll significant numbers of minority students.

Among high-achieving, low-income students, 6 percent were black, 8 percent Latino, 15 percent Asian-American and 69 percent white, the study found.

“If there are changes to how we define diversity,” said Greg W. Roberts, the dean of admission at the University of Virginia, referring to the court case, “then I expect schools will really work hard at identifying low-income students.”

Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Avery, both economists, compared the current approach of colleges to looking under a streetlight for a lost key. The institutions continue to focus their recruiting efforts on a small subset of high schools in cities like Boston, New York and Los Angeles that have strong low-income students.

The researchers defined high-achieving students as those very likely to gain admission to a selective college, which translated into roughly the top 4 percent nationwide. Students needed to have at least an A-minus average and a score in the top 10 percent among students who took the SAT or the ACT.

Of these high achievers, 34 percent came from families in the top fourth of earners, 27 percent from the second fourth, 22 percent from the third fourth and 17 percent from the bottom fourth. (The researchers based the income cutoffs on the population of families with a high school senior living at home, with $41,472 being the dividing line for the bottom quartile and $120,776 for the top.)

Winona Leon, a sophomore at the University of Southern California who grew up in West Texas, said she was not surprised by the study’s results. Ms. Leon was the valedictorian of her 17-member senior class in the ranch town of Fort Davis, where Advanced Placement classes and SAT preparation were rare.

“It was really on ourselves to create those resources,” she said.

She first assumed that faraway colleges would be too expensive, given their high list prices and the cost of plane tickets home. But after receiving a mailing from QuestBridge, an outreach program for low-income students, she came to realize that a top college might offer her enough financial aid to make it less expensive than a state university in Texas.

On average, private colleges and top state universities are substantially more expensive than community colleges, even with financial aid. But some colleges, especially the most selective, offer enough aid to close or eliminate the gap for low-income students.

If they make it to top colleges, high-achieving, low-income students tend to thrive there, the paper found. Based on the most recent data, 89 percent of such students at selective colleges had graduated or were on pace to do so, compared with only 50 percent of top low-income students at nonselective colleges.

The study will be published in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.

The authors emphasized that their data did not prove that students not applying to top colleges would apply and excel if colleges recruited them more heavily. Ms. Hoxby and Sarah Turner, a University of Virginia professor, are conducting follow-up research in which they perform random trials to evaluate which recruiting techniques work and how the students subsequently do.

For colleges, the potential recruiting techniques include mailed brochures, phone calls, e-mail, social media and outreach from alumni. Another recent study, cited in the Hoxby-Avery paper, suggests that very selective colleges have at least one graduate in the “vast majority of U.S. counties.”

    Better Colleges Failing to Lure Talented Poor, NYT, 16.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/education/
    scholarly-poor-often-overlook-better-colleges.html

A State Backs Guns in Class for Teachers

March 8, 2013
The New York Times
By JOHN ELIGON

South Dakota became the first state in the nation to enact a law explicitly authorizing school employees to carry guns on the job, under a measure signed into law on Friday by Gov. Dennis Daugaard.

Passage of the law comes amid a passionate nationwide debate over arming teachers, stoked after 20 first graders died in an elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., in December. Shortly afterward, the National Rifle Association proposed a plan for armed security officers in every school, and legislation to allow school personnel to carry guns was introduced in about two dozen states. All those measures had stalled until now.

Several other states already have provisions in their laws — or no legal restrictions — that make it possible for teachers to possess guns in the classroom. In fact, a handful of school districts nationwide do have teachers who carry firearms. But South Dakota is the only known state with a statute that specifically authorizes teachers to possess a firearm in a K-12 school, according to Lauren Heintz, a research analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Representative Scott Craig, a freshman Republican in the South Dakota House who sponsored the bill, said he hoped the measure would shift the country’s discourse on school safety.

“Given the national attention to safety in schools, specifically in response to tragedies like in Connecticut, this is huge,” he said. He added that, hopefully, “dominoes will start to fall, people will see it’s reasonable, it’s safer than they think, it’s proactive and it’s preventive.”

The law leaves it up to school districts to decide whether to allow armed teachers. It remains to be seen, however, if many schools will permit guns in classrooms and whether the measure will reverberate nationwide. Mr. Daugaard, a Republican, said he did not think that many schools would take advantage of the option, but that it was important for them to have the choice available.

While many gun control advocates are horrified by the notion of guns in schools, Laura Cutilletta, a senior staff lawyer with the San Francisco-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said that what South Dakota did would not spark a national trend. “For South Dakota to do this is less of a concern than if we saw it in Colorado or somewhere else like that,” she said, referring to states that have advocated for gun-control legislation.

Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association, said the group supported the bill and lobbied for it in the South Dakota Legislature. “There’s certainly not a one-size-fits-all approach to keeping our children safe in schools,” he said. “It’s incumbent upon state and local governments to formulate and implement a plan to keep students safe.”

The law says that school districts may choose to allow a school employee, a hired security officer or a volunteer to serve as a “sentinel” who can carry a firearm in the school. The school district must receive the permission of its local law enforcement agency before carrying out the program. The law requires the sentinels to undergo training similar to what law enforcement officers receive.

“I think it does provide the same safety precautions that a citizen expects when a law enforcement officer enters onto a premises,” Mr. Daugaard said in an interview. He added that this law was more restrictive than those in other states that permit guns in schools.

South Dakota is a state with deep roots in hunting, where children start learning how to shoot BB guns when they are 8, skeet shoot with shotguns by age 14 and enter target shooting contests with .22-caliber semiautomatic rifles.

“Our kids start hunting here when they’re preteens,” said Kevin Jensen, who supports the bill and is the vice president of the Canton School Board in South Dakota. “We know guns. We respect guns.”

Opponents, which included state associations representing school boards and teachers, said the bill was rushed, did not make schools safer and ignored other approaches to safety.

Wade Pogany, the executive director of the Associated School Boards of South Dakota, said he believed more discussion was necessary before passing this bill. “If firearms are the best option that we have, I’ll stand down,” Dr. Pogany said. “But let’s not come into a heated, emotional debate about this and say this is the answer. This is premature.”

Supporters say the measure is important in a state where some schools are many miles away from emergency responders, who can take upward of 30 or 45 minutes to reach some areas.

But Don Kirkegaard, the superintendent of the Meade School District, which encompasses 11 schools over 3,200 square miles, said that although some of his institutions were isolated, he did not see any evidence to suggest that they would be safer if teachers were armed. Mr. Kirkegaard said that schools in more populated areas have been most affected by shootings.

“The likelihood of it happening in our rural attendant centers is not nearly as probable as it is in the urban city areas,” he said.

But his school district, like many others across the state and country, does employ an armed “resource officer” affiliated with the police who bounces between the schools. Opponents of the legislation said they would be more comfortable with providing resources to districts so they could hire law enforcement to protect the schools.

It is unclear how many school districts nationwide have teachers carrying guns. Hawaii and New Hampshire do not have any prohibition against carrying weapons on school property for those with concealed carry permits. Texas’s law against carrying weapons in school includes an exemption for people whom the school authorizes.

The Harrold Independent School District in Texas began allowing teachers to carry weapons in 2008. Utah is also said to have teachers who carry guns in the classroom, though they do not have to disclose it publicly. Supporters point out that there have been no accidents in states where teachers do carry guns.

But a couple of recent episodes could leave some people unsettled about firearms in schools.

A maintenance worker at an East Texas school that plans to allow its staff to carry guns accidentally shot himself during firearms safety training last month. And a police officer assigned to patrol a high school in a town north of New York City after the Newtown shooting was suspended this week because he accidentally fired his gun in the hallway during school hours.

    A State Backs Guns in Class for Teachers, NYT, 8.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/us/south-dakota-gun-law-classrooms.html

Racist Incidents Stun Campus

and Halt Classes at Oberlin

March 4, 2013
The New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and TRIP GABRIEL

OBERLIN, Ohio — Oberlin College, known as much for ardent liberalism as for academic excellence, canceled classes on Monday and convened a “day of solidarity” after the latest in a monthlong string of what it called hate-related incidents and vandalism.

At an emotional gathering in the packed 1,200-seat campus chapel, the college president, Marvin Krislov, apologized on behalf of the college to students who felt threatened by the incidents and said classes were canceled for “a different type of educational exercise,” one intended to hold “an honest discussion, even a difficult discussion.”

In the last month, racist, anti-Semitic and antigay messages have been left around campus, a jarring incongruity in a place with the liberal political leanings and traditions of Oberlin, a school of 2,800 students in Ohio, about 30 miles southwest of Cleveland. Guides to colleges routinely list it as among the most progressive, activist and gay-friendly schools in the country.

The incidents included slurs written on Black History Month posters, drawings of swastikas and the message “Whites Only” scrawled above a water fountain. After midnight on Sunday, someone reported seeing a person dressed in a white robe and hood near the Afrikan Heritage House. Mr. Krislov and three deans announced the sighting in a community-wide e-mail early Monday morning.

“From what we have seen we believe these actions are the work of a very small number of cowardly people,” Mr. Krislov told students, declining to give further details because the campus security department and the Oberlin city police are investigating.

A college spokesman, Scott Wargo, said investigators had not determined whether the suspect or suspects were students or from off-campus.

Several students who spoke out at the campuswide meeting criticized the administration, saying it was not doing enough to create a “safe and inclusive” environment and was taking action only when prodded by student activists. But beyond the chapel, many students praised the administration for a decisive response.

“I was pretty shocked it would happen here,” said Sarah Kahl, a 19-year-old freshman from Boston. “It’s a little scary.” She said there was an implied threat behind the incidents. “That’s why this day is so important, so urgent.”

Meredith Gadsby, the chairwoman of the Afrikana Studies department, which hosted a teach-in at midday attended by about 300 students, said, “Many of our students feel very frightened, very insecure.”

One purpose of the teach-in was to make students aware of groups that have formed, some in the past 24 hours in dorms, to respond.

“They’ll be addressing ways to publicly respond to the bias incidents with what I call positive propaganda, and let people know, whoever the culprits are, that they’re being watched, and people are taking care of themselves and each other,” Dr. Gadsby said.

The opinion of many students was that the incidents did not reflect a prevailing bigotry on campus, and may well be the work of someone just trying to stir trouble. “It seems to bark worse than it bites,” said Cooper McDonald, a 19-year-old sophomore from Newton, Mass.

“I can’t see many of my classmates — any of my classmates — doing things like this,” he said. “It doesn’t reflect the town, either.”

He added: “The way the school handled it was awesome. It’s not an angry response, it’s all very positive.”

The report of a person in a costume meant to evoke the Ku Klux Klan added a more threatening element than earlier incidents. The convocation with the president and deans, originally scheduled for Wednesday, was moved overnight, to Monday. “When it was just graffiti people were alarmed and disturbed. But this is much more threatening,” said Mim Halpern, 18, a freshman from Toronto.

There were few details of the sighting, which occurred at 1:30 a.m. on Monday, Mr. Wargo said. The person who reported it was in a car “and came back around and didn’t see the individual again,” he added.

Anne Trubek, an associate professor in the English department, said that in her 15 years at Oberlin there had been earlier bias incidents but none so provocative. “They were relatively minor events that would not be a large hullabaloo elsewhere, but because Oberlin is so attuned to these issues they get addressed very quickly,” she said.

Founded in 1833, Oberlin was one of the first colleges in the nation to educate women and men together, and one of the first to admit black students. Before the Civil War, it was an abolitionist hotbed and an important stop on the Underground Railroad.

Richard Pérez-Peña reported from Oberlin,

and Trip Gabriel from New York.

    Racist Incidents Stun Campus and Halt Classes at Oberlin, NYT, 4.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/education/
    oberlin-cancels-classes-after-series-of-hate-related-incidents.html

The Trouble With Online College

February 18, 2013
The New York Times


Stanford University ratcheted up interest in online education when a pair of celebrity professors attracted more than 150,000 students from around the world to a noncredit, open enrollment course on artificial intelligence. This development, though, says very little about what role online courses could have as part of standard college instruction. College administrators who dream of emulating this strategy for classes like freshman English would be irresponsible not to consider two serious issues.

First, student attrition rates — around 90 percent for some huge online courses — appear to be a problem even in small-scale online courses when compared with traditional face-to-face classes. Second, courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed.

Online classes are already common in colleges, and, on the whole, the record is not encouraging. According to Columbia University’s Community College Research Center, for example, about seven million students — about a third of all those enrolled in college — are enrolled in what the center describes as traditional online courses. These typically have about 25 students and are run by professors who often have little interaction with students. Over all, the center has produced nine studies covering hundreds of thousands of classes in two states, Washington and Virginia. The picture the studies offer of the online revolution is distressing.

The research has shown over and over again that community college students who enroll in online courses are significantly more likely to fail or withdraw than those in traditional classes, which means that they spend hard-earned tuition dollars and get nothing in return. Worse still, low-performing students who may be just barely hanging on in traditional classes tend to fall even further behind in online courses.

A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students enrolled in Washington State community and technical colleges. It found that those who took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer to four-year colleges. The reasons for such failures are well known. Many students, for example, show up at college (or junior college) unprepared to learn, unable to manage time and having failed to master basics like math and English.

Lacking confidence as well as competence, these students need engagement with their teachers to feel comfortable and to succeed. What they often get online is estrangement from the instructor who rarely can get to know them directly. Colleges need to improve online courses before they deploy them widely. Moreover, schools with high numbers of students needing remedial education should consider requiring at least some students to demonstrate success in traditional classes before allowing them to take online courses.

Interestingly, the center found that students in hybrid classes — those that blended online instruction with a face-to-face component — performed as well academically as those in traditional classes. But hybrid courses are rare, and teaching professors how to manage them is costly and time-consuming.

The online revolution offers intriguing opportunities for broadening access to education. But, so far, the evidence shows that poorly designed courses can seriously shortchange the most vulnerable students.

    The Trouble With Online College, NYT, 18.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/opinion/the-trouble-with-online-college.html

The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools

February 9, 2013
The New York Times
By DAVID L. KIRP

WHAT would it really take to give students a first-rate education? Some argue that our schools are irremediably broken and that charter schools offer the only solution. The striking achievement of Union City, N.J. — bringing poor, mostly immigrant kids into the educational mainstream — argues for reinventing the public schools we have.

Union City makes an unlikely poster child for education reform. It’s a poor community with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average. Three-quarters of the students live in homes where only Spanish is spoken. A quarter are thought to be undocumented, living in fear of deportation.

Public schools in such communities have often operated as factories for failure. This used to be true in Union City, where the schools were once so wretched that state officials almost seized control of them. How things have changed. From third grade through high school, students’ achievement scores now approximate the statewide average. What’s more, in 2011, Union City boasted a high school graduation rate of 89.5 percent — roughly 10 percentage points higher than the national average. Last year, 75 percent of Union City graduates enrolled in college, with top students winning scholarships to the Ivies.

As someone who has worked on education policy for four decades, I’ve never seen the likes of this. After spending a year in Union City working on a book, I believe its transformation offers a nationwide strategy.

Ask school officials to explain Union City’s success and they start with prekindergarten, which enrolls almost every 3- and 4-year-old. There’s abundant research showing the lifetime benefits of early education. Here, seeing is believing.

One December morning the lesson is making latkes, the potato pancakes that are a Hanukkah staple. Everything that transpires during these 90 minutes could be called a “teachable moment” — describing the smell of an onion (“Strong or light? Strong — duro. Will it smell differently when we cook it? We’ll have to find out.”); pronouncing the “p” in pepper and pimento; getting the hang of a food processor (“When I put all the ingredients in, what will happen?”).

Cognitive and noncognitive, thinking and feeling; here, this line vanishes. The good teacher is always on the lookout for both kinds of lessons, always aiming to reach both head and heart. “My goal is to do for these kids what I do with my own children,” the teacher, Susana Rojas, tells me. “It’s all about exposure to concepts — wide, narrow, long, short. I bring in breads from different countries. ‘Let’s do a pie chart showing which one you liked the best.’ I don’t ask them to memorize 1, 2, 3 — I could teach a monkey to count.”

From pre-K to high school, the make-or-break factor is what the Harvard education professor Richard Elmore calls the “instructional core” — the skills of the teacher, the engagement of the students and the rigor of the curriculum. To succeed, students must become thinkers, not just test-takers.

When Alina Bossbaly greets her third grade students, ethics are on her mind. “Room 210 is a pie — un pie — and each of us is a slice of that pie.” The pie offers a down-to-earth way of talking about a community where everyone has a place. Building character and getting students to think is her mission. From Day 1, her kids are writing in their journals, sifting out the meaning of stories and solving math problems. Every day, Ms. Bossbaly is figuring out what’s best for each child, rather than batch-processing them.

Though Ms. Bossbaly is a star, her philosophy pervades the district. Wherever I went, these schools felt less like impersonal institutions than the simulacrum of an extended family.

UNTIL recently, Union City High bore the scarlet-letter label, “school in need of improvement.” It has taken strong leadership from its principal, John Bennetti, to turn things around — to instill the belief that education can be a ticket out of poverty.

On Day 1, the principal lays out the house rules. Everything is tied to a single theme — pride and respect in “our house” — that resonates with the community culture of family, unity and respect. “Cursing doesn’t showcase our talents. Breaking the dress code means we’re setting a tone that unity isn’t important, coming in late means missing opportunities to learn.” Bullying is high on his list of nonnegotiables: “We are about caring and supporting.”

These students sometimes behave like college freshmen, as in a seminar where they’re parsing Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” They can be boisterously jokey with their teachers. But there’s none of the note-swapping, gum-chewing, wisecracking, talking-back rudeness you’d anticipate if your opinions about high school had been shaped by movies like “Dangerous Minds.”

And the principal is persuading teachers to raise their expectations. “There should be more courses that prepare students for college, not simply more work but higher-quality work,” he tells me. This approach is paying off big time: Last year, in a study of 22,000 American high schools, U.S. News & World Report and the American Institutes for Research ranked Union City High in the top 22 percent.

What makes Union City remarkable is, paradoxically, the absence of pizazz. It hasn’t followed the herd by closing “underperforming” schools or giving the boot to hordes of teachers. No Teach for America recruits toil in its classrooms, and there are no charter schools.

A quarter-century ago, fear of a state takeover catalyzed a transformation. The district’s best educators were asked to design a curriculum based on evidence, not hunch. Learning by doing replaced learning by rote. Kids who came to school speaking only Spanish became truly bilingual, taught how to read and write in their native tongue before tackling English. Parents were enlisted in the cause. Teachers were urged to work together, the superstars mentoring the stragglers and coaches recruited to add expertise. Principals were expected to become educational leaders, not just disciplinarians and paper-shufflers.

From a loose confederacy, the schools gradually morphed into a coherent system that marries high expectations with a “we can do it” attitude. “The real story of Union City is that it didn’t fall back,” says Fred Carrigg, a key architect of the reform. “It stabilized and has continued to improve.”

To any educator with a pulse, this game plan sounds so old-school obvious that it verges on platitude. That these schools are generously financed clearly makes a difference — not every community will decide to pay for two years of prekindergarten — but too many districts squander their resources.

School officials flock to Union City and other districts that have beaten the odds, eager for a quick fix. But they’re on a fool’s errand. These places — and there are a host of them, largely unsung — didn’t become exemplars by behaving like magpies, taking shiny bits and pieces and gluing them together. Instead, each devised a long-term strategy reaching from preschool to high school. Each keeps learning from experience and tinkering with its model. Nationwide, there’s no reason school districts — big or small; predominantly white, Latino or black — cannot construct a system that, like the schools of Union City, bends the arc of children’s lives.

David L. Kirp is a professor of public policy

at the University of California, Berkeley,

and the author of the forthcoming book

“Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System

and a Strategy for America’s Schools.”

    The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools, NYT, 9.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/the-secret-to-fixing-bad-schools.html

Students Disciplined in Harvard Scandal

February 1, 2013
The New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

Harvard has forced dozens of students to leave in its largest cheating scandal in memory, the university made clear in summing up the affair on Friday, but it would not address assertions that the blame rested partly with a professor and his teaching assistants.

Harvard would not say how many students had been disciplined for cheating on a take-home final exam given last May in a government class, but the university’s statements indicated that the number forced out was around 70. The class had 279 students, and Harvard administrators said last summer that “nearly half” were suspected of cheating and would have their cases reviewed by the Administrative Board. On Friday, a Harvard dean, Michael D. Smith, wrote in a letter to faculty members and students that, of those cases, “somewhat more than half” had resulted in a student’s being required to withdraw.

Dr. Smith, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, wrote, “Of the remaining cases, roughly half the students received disciplinary probation, while the balance ended in no disciplinary action.” He wrote that the last of the cases was concluded in December; no explanation was offered for the delay in making a statement. The forced withdrawals were retroactive to the start of the school year, he wrote, and those students’ tuition payments would be refunded.

The Administrative Board’s Web site says that forced withdrawals usually last two to four semesters, after which a student may return.

Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who has spent much of his career studying cheating, said that eventually, the university should “give a much more complete account of exactly what happened and why it happened.”

The episode has given a black eye to one of the world’s great educational institutions, where in an average year, 17 students are forced out for academic dishonesty. It was a heavy blow to sports programs, because the class drew a large number of varsity athletes, some of them on the basketball team. Two players accused of cheating withdrew in September rather than risk losing a year of athletic eligibility on a season that disciplinary action could cut short.

People briefed on the investigations say that they went on longer than expected because the university’s effort was painstaking, hiring additional staff members to comb through each student’s exam and even color-coding specific words that appeared in multiple papers.

One implicated student, who argued that similarities between his paper and others could be traced to shared lecture notes, said the Administrative Board demanded that he produce the notes six months later. The student, who asked not to be identified because he still must deal with Harvard administrators, said he found some notes and was not forced to withdraw.

Some Harvard professors and alumni, along with many students, have protested that the university was too slow in resolving the cases, too vague about its ethical standards or too tough on the accused.

Robert Peabody, a lawyer representing two implicated students, said as their cases dragged on, with frequent postponement, “they emotionally deteriorated over the course of the semester.” He said one was forced to leave the university, and the other was placed on academic probation.

While Harvard has not identified the course or the professor involved, they were quickly identified by the implicated students as Introduction to Congress and Matthew B. Platt, an assistant professor of government. Dr. Platt did not respond to messages seeking comment Friday.

In previous years, students called it an easy class with optional attendance and frequent collaboration. But students who took it last spring said that it had suddenly become quite difficult, with tests that were hard to comprehend, so they sought help from the graduate students who ran the class discussion groups and graded assignments. Those teaching fellows, they said, readily advised them on interpreting exam questions.

Administrators said that on final-exam questions, some students supplied identical answers, down to, in some cases, typographical errors, indicating that they had written them together or plagiarized them. But some students claimed that the similarities in their answers were due to sharing notes or sitting in on sessions with the same teaching fellows. The instructions on the take-home exam explicitly prohibited collaboration, but many students said they did not think that included talking with teaching fellows.

Dr. Smith’s long note did not say how the Administrative Board viewed such distinctions, or whether the university had investigated the conduct of the professor and teaching fellows, and a spokesman said Harvard would not elaborate on those questions.

    Students Disciplined in Harvard Scandal, NYT, 1.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/education/harvard-forced-dozens-to-leave-in-cheating-scandal.html

More Lessons About Charter Schools

February 1, 2013
The New York Times

The charter school movement gained a foothold in American education two decades ago partly by asserting that independently run, publicly financed schools would outperform traditional public schools if they were exempted from onerous regulations. The charter advocates also promised that unlike traditional schools, which were allowed to fail without consequence, charter schools would be rigorously reviewed and shut down when they failed to perform.

With thousands of charter schools now operating in 40 states, and more coming online every day, neither of these promises has been kept. Despite a growing number of studies showing that charter schools are generally no better — and often are worse — than their traditional counterparts, the state and local agencies and organizations that grant the charters have been increasingly hesitant to shut down schools, even those that continue to perform abysmally for years on end.

If the movement is to maintain its credibility, the charter authorizers must shut down failed schools quickly and limit new charters to the most credible applicants, including operators who have a demonstrated record of success.

That is the clear message of continuing analysis from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, which tracks student performance in 25 states. In 2009, its large-scale study showed that only 17 percent of charter schools provided a better education than traditional schools, and 37 percent actually offered children a worse education.

A study released this week by the center suggests that the standards used by the charter authorizers to judge school performance are terribly weak.

It debunked the common notion that it takes a long time to tell whether a new school can improve student learning. In fact, the study notes, it is pretty clear after just three years which schools are going to be high performers and which of them will be mediocre. By that time, the charter authorizers should be putting troubled schools on notice that they might soon be closed. As the study notes: “For the majority of schools, poor first year performance will give way to poor second year performance. Once this has happened, the future is predictable and extremely bleak. For the students enrolled in these schools, this is a tragedy that must not be dismissed.”

The same principles should apply to decisions to allow charter school operators to expand into charter management organizations, which manage several schools under a single organizational umbrella. Permission to expand should be granted only if the schools can demonstrate that they can actually improve student performance.

The study found that minority students and those from poor families fared better in charter management organizations. For example, the Kipp super-network and the Uncommon Schools, two large, established networks, have seen “strong and positive learning gains” for their students.

The study does not explain why these schools perform so well. But the answer is likely that they closely replicate a successful learning program and they keep the level of teaching uniformly high. In any case, the researchers and policy makers need to pay closer attention to how these schools function. For according to the study, Kipp and the Uncommon Schools have actually managed to eliminate the learning gap between poor and higher-income students.

Currently, only 6 percent of all schools are charter schools, and charter networks account for only about one-fifth of that total. States that are in a hurry to expand charter schools should proceed carefully. The evidence of success is not all that ample.

    More Lessons About Charter Schools, NYT, 1.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/opinion/
    more-lessons-about-charter-schools.html

My Valuable, Cheap College Degree

January 31, 2013
The New York Times
By ARTHUR C. BROOKS

WASHINGTON

MUCH is being written about the preposterously high cost of college. The median inflation-adjusted household income fell by 7 percent between 2006 and 2011, while the average real tuition at public four-year colleges increased over that period by over 18 percent. Meanwhile, the average tuition for just one year at a four-year private university in 2011 was almost $33,000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. College tuition has increased at twice the rate of health care costs over the past 25 years.

Ballooning student loan debt, an impending college bubble, and a return on the bachelor’s degree that is flat or falling: all these things scream out for entrepreneurial solutions.

One idea gaining currency is the $10,000 college degree — the so-called 10K-B.A. — which apparently was inspired by a challenge to educators from Bill Gates, and has recently led to efforts to make it a reality by governors in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin, as well as by a state assemblyman in California.

Most 10K-B.A. proposals rethink the costliest part of higher education — the traditional classroom teaching. Predictably, this means a reliance on online and distance-learning alternatives. And just as predictably, this has stimulated antibodies to unconventional modes of learning. Some critics see it as an invitation to charlatans and diploma mills. Even supporters often suggest that this is just an idea to give poor people marginally better life opportunities.

As Darryl Tippens, the provost of Pepperdine University, recently put it, “No PowerPoint presentation or elegant online lecture can make up for the surprise, the frisson, the spontaneous give-and-take of a spirited, open-ended dialogue with another person.” And what happens when you excise those frissons? In the words of the president of one university faculty association, “You’re going to be awarding degrees that are worthless to people.”

I disagree. I possess a 10K-B.A., which I got way back in 1994. And it was the most important intellectual and career move I ever made.

After high school, I spent an unedifying year in college. The year culminated in money problems, considerably less than a year of credits, and a joint decision with the school that I should pursue my happiness elsewhere. Next came what my parents affectionately called my “gap decade,” during which time I made my living as a musician. By my late 20s I was ready to return to school. But I was living in Spain, had a thin bank account, and no desire to start my family with a mountain of student loans.

Fortunately, there was a solution — an institution called Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, N.J. This is a virtual college with no residence requirements. It banks credits acquired through inexpensive correspondence courses from any accredited college or university in America.

I took classes by mail from the University of Washington, the University of Wyoming, and other schools with the lowest-priced correspondence courses I could find. My degree required the same number of credits and type of classes that any student at a traditional university would take. I took the same exams (proctored at local libraries and graded by graduate students) as in-person students. But I never met a teacher, never sat in a classroom, and to this day have never laid eyes on my beloved alma mater.

And the whole degree, including the third-hand books and a sticker for the car, cost me about $10,000 in today’s dollars.

Now living back in the United States, I followed the 10K-B.A. with a 5K-M.A. at a local university while working full time, and then endured the standard penury of being a full-time doctoral fellow in a residential Ph.D. program. The final tally for a guy in his 30s supporting a family: three degrees, zero debt.

Did I earn a worthless degree? Hardly. My undergraduate years may have been bereft of frissons, but I wound up with a career as a tenured professor at Syracuse University, a traditional university. I am now the president of a Washington research organization.

Not surprisingly, my college experience has occasionally been the target of ridicule. It is true that I am no Harvard Man. But I can say with full confidence that my 10K-B.A. is what made higher education possible for me, and it changed the course of my life. More people should have this opportunity, in a society that is suffering from falling economic and social mobility.

The 10K-B.A. is exactly the kind of innovation we would expect in an industry that is showing every indication of a bubble that is about to burst, as Thomas K. Lindsay of the Texas Public Policy Foundation shows in a new report titled, “Anatomy of a Revolution? The Rise of the $10,000 Bachelor’s Degree.” When tuition skyrockets and returns on education stagnate, we can expect a flight to value, especially by people who can least afford to ride the bubble, and who have no choice but to make a cost-effective college investment.

In the end, however, the case for the 10K-B.A. is primarily moral, not financial. The entrepreneurs who see a way for millions to go to college affordably are the ones who understand the American dream. That dream is the opportunity to build a life through earned success. That starts with education.

Arthur C. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute

and a former professor at Syracuse University.

    My Valuable, Cheap College Degree, NYT, 31.1.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/opinion/my-valuable-cheap-college-degree.html

In California, Son Gets Chance

to Restore Luster to a Legacy

January 28, 2013
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — During a 1960s renaissance, California’s public university system came to be seen as a model for the rest of the country and an economic engine for the state. Seven new campuses opened, statewide enrollment doubled, and state spending on higher education more than doubled. The man widely credited with the ascendance was Gov. Edmund G. Brown, known as Pat.

Decades of state budget cuts have chipped away at California’s community colleges, California State University and the University of California, once the state’s brightest beacons of pride. But now Pat Brown’s son, Gov. Jerry Brown, seems determined to restore some of the luster to the institution that remains a key part of his father’s legacy.

Last year, he told voters that a tax increase was the only way to avoid more years of drastic cuts. Now, with the tax increase approved and universities anticipating more money from the state for the first time in years, the second Governor Brown is a man eager to take an active role in shaping the University of California and California State University systems.

Governor Brown holds a position on the board of trustees for both Cal State and UC. Since November, he has attended every meeting of both boards, asking about everything from dormitories to private donations and federal student loans. He is twisting arms on issues he has long held dear, like slashing executive pay and increasing teaching requirements for professors — ideas that have long been met with considerable resistance from academia. But Mr. Brown, himself a graduate of University of California, Berkeley, has never been a man to shrink from a debate.

“The language we use when talking about the university must be honest and clear,” he said in a recent interview. “Words like ‘quality’ have no apparent meaning that is obvious. These are internally defined to meet institutional needs rather than societal objectives.”

California’s public colleges — so central to the state’s identity that their independence is enshrined in its Constitution — have long been seen as gateways to the middle class. Mr. Brown said his mother had attended the schools “basically free.” Over the last five years tuition at UC and Cal State schools has shot up, though the colleges remain some of the less costly in the country.

Governors and legislatures are trying to exert more influence on state colleges, often trying to prod the schools to save money, matters that some say are “arguably best left to the academic institution,” said John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow of public policy and higher education at Berkeley. So far, Mr. Brown has not taken such an aggressive approach, but half of the $250 million increase for the university systems is contingent on a tuition freeze.

“He’s creating stability, but basically he’s looking at cost containment with an eye on the public constituency,” Mr. Douglass said. “But the system has been through a very long period of disinvestment, and this may meet an immediate political need, but it is not what is going to help in the long term.”

Over all, the University of California receives 44 percent less from the state than it did in 1990, accounting for inflation. The governor’s proposed increase still leaves the schools with about $625 million less than they received in 2007. At the same time, a record number of students applied for admissions to the system’s 10 campuses for next fall. While the California State University system has capped freshman enrollment, administrators at the UC system, which has about 190,000 undergraduate students, have been reluctant to formally do so, in part to prevent limiting access to in-state students.

Spurred by grumbling from voters, legislators have repeatedly complained that too many out-of-state students are enrolling in the University of California, arguing that they take spots away from talented local students. But others argue that without the out-of-state students, who make up less than 9 percent of undergraduates and pay much more in tuition, the university would have to make even deeper cuts.

Timothy White, the newly appointed chancellor for California State University and the former chancellor at UC Riverside, said the systems were facing a fundamental dilemma over access.

“Our budget is not going to allow us to grow enrollment at all, so I’m concerned that we are going to disappoint a lot of people in a lot of communities,” he said.

So far, the governor has focused his attention on whether the universities should be offering more courses online, requiring faculty to teach more classes and cutting administrators’ pay.

His plea that faculty members, particularly at the University of California, teach more undergraduate classes has been met with resistance, with one trustee fretting that doing so would “turn this place into a junior college in about 15 years.” Faculty members say that requiring more teaching would take away from crucial research areas, which will bring in roughly $5 billion this year.

“You can talk abstractly about faculty teaching more, but that begs the question of what you give up by requiring them to teach more,” said Daniel Dooley, the senior vice president for external relations for the University of California. Mr. Dooley, who worked in Mr. Brown’s first administration in the 1970s, has had several conversations with the governor about the state colleges.

Even before he began attending the board of trustee meetings, Mr. Brown repeatedly criticized high salaries for university administrators, arguing that they should serve as “public servants” and be willing to accept smaller paychecks. During his last term he famously remarked that professors derived “psychic income” from their jobs. When the University of California board of trustees voted to approve the new chancellor at Berkeley, in November, Mr. Brown voted in favor of his appointment, but voted against his $486,000 salary.

Some see the governor’s new focus as a sign that there could be major improvements afoot, but others are less optimistic.

“The old days of the social compact with the state is gone,” Mr. Douglass said. “It seems clear that it will not come back.”

    In California, Son Gets Chance to Restore Luster to a Legacy, NYT, 28.1.2013,
    www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/education/jerry-brown-looks-at-reshaping-higher-education-in-california.html

Newtown Debates School’s Fate

After Shooting

January 13, 2013
The New York Times
By RAY RIVERA

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Many people here still remember the huge green footprints that once led up to the front entrance of Sandy Hook Elementary School. Children were told that they had been left by the Jolly Green Giant.

That was one of the many fond memories of the school, memories that connect families and generations. Now, as this community of 27,000 struggles to recover from a mass shooting that killed 20 first graders and six staff members at the school, public officials and residents have begun preparing for the painful decision over what to do with the building.

Residents packed into the auditorium of Newtown High School on Sunday afternoon for the first of what might be several meetings to discuss the school’s future. Opinions varied sharply about whether to reopen the school, renovate it, turn it into a shrine or a park, or raze it.

Stephanie Carson, who has a son who was at the school on Dec. 14, the day of the shooting, said it should be knocked down.

“I cannot ask my son or any of the people at the school to ever walk back into that building, and he has asked to never go back,” she said. “I know that there are children who were there who have said they would like to go back to Sandy Hook. However, the reality is we have to be so careful. Even walking down the halls, the children become so scared at any unusual sound. I don’t see how it would be possible.”

A month after the shooting, Sandy Hook Elementary remains a crime scene. Few have been allowed past the police cars and barricades still guarding the roadway and into the building where Adam Lanza, for reasons still unknown, went on a horrifying killing spree before fatally shooting himself.

Earlier this month, the school’s 400 students began attending a school that had been shuttered in nearby Monroe, Conn. That building was reopened after the hallways and classrooms were remade to resemble the ones they had left behind.

Audra Barth, the mother of a third grader and a first grader at Sandy Hook, was among the parents who said closing the school would further rob children who had already lost so much.

“My children have had everything taken away from them,” she said. Referring to the numerous gifts, including candy, that had been donated since the shooting, she added, “Chocolate is great, but they need their school.”

If there was a unifying theme among parents and others in Sunday’s comments, it was that the children should be kept together, at least for the next several years, and not split apart into separate schools. The concerns, raised by many of the parents who spoke, stemmed from discussions last year — before the shooting — in which school officials proposed closing down an elementary school and shuffling the district. E. Patricia Llodra, Newtown’s first selectwoman, said that proposal was no longer being considered.

Discussions over the school building’s fate seemed to be the latest step in the community’s slow path to recovery, coming after the Public Works Department began picking up the bounty of flowers, teddy bears, paper angels and other tributes that had accumulated on the roadsides around the school.

More meetings will come when the town begins looking at how to honor the victims with a permanent memorial.

Ideas on Sunday included turning the school into a planetarium where children could gaze at the stars and converting it into a center for peace education.

Newtown is the latest in a growing list of communities that have been thrust into making such a choice.

After two students killed 12 other students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado in April 1999, that community ultimately decided to keep that school open. Some $2.6 million, much of it donated, was spent on renovations that included turning the library, where the gunmen ended their rampage, into a glass atrium with a canopy of evergreens and aspens painted on the ceilings.

At Virginia Tech, where 32 people were gunned down by a student in April 2007, the building where 30 of the killings occurred was turned into the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention.

Mergim Bajraliu, 17, a senior at Newtown High School who attended Sandy Hook Elementary and whose sister, a fourth grader, was there the day of the shooting, urged the town to follow the examples of Columbine and Virginia Tech.

“Despite everything that happened to my sister, both her and I have amazing memories of that school,” he said on Sunday, recalling sack races and visits to the nearby firehouse. “I think children in the future deserve the same youthful memories I have.”

    Newtown Debates School’s Fate After Shooting, NYT, 13.1.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/nyregion/
    newtown-debates-the-fate-of-sandy-hook-elementary-school.html

Catholic Education, in Need of Salvation

January 6, 2013
The New York Times
By PATRICK J. McCLOSKEY and JOSEPH CLAUDE HARRIS

CATHOLIC parochial education is in crisis. More than a third of parochial schools in the United States closed between 1965 and 1990, and enrollment fell by more than half. After stabilizing in the 1990s, enrollment has plunged despite strong demand from students and families.

Closings of elementary and middle schools have become a yearly ritual in the Northeast and Midwest, home to two-thirds of the nation’s Catholic schools. Last year, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia closed one-fifth of its elementary schools. Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York, is expected to decide soon whether to shut 26 elementary schools and one high school, less than three years after the latest closings. Catholic high schools have held on, but their long-term future is in question.

This isn’t for want of students. Almost 30 percent of Catholic schools have waiting lists, even after sharp tuition increases over the past decade. The American Catholic population has grown by 45 percent since 1965. Hispanics, who are often underserved by public schools, account for about 45 percent of American Catholics and an even higher proportion of Catholic children, but many cannot afford rising fees.

Since the early 19th century, parochial schools have given free or affordable educations to needy and affluent students alike. Inner-city Catholic schools, which began by serving poor European immigrants, severed the connection between poverty and low academic performance for generations of low-income (and often non-Catholic) minority kids.

Until the 1960s, religious orders were united in responding to Christ’s mandate to “go teach.” But religious vocations have become less attractive, and parochial schools have faced increasing competition from charter schools. Without a turnaround, many dioceses will soon have only scatterings of elite Catholic academies for middle-class and affluent families and a token number of inner-city schools, propped up by wealthy donors.

As in other areas, the church has lost its way, by failing to prioritize parochial education. Despite the sex-abuse scandals and two recessions, church revenue — which flows from parishes via Sunday donations, bequests and so on — grew to $11.9 billion in 2010, an inflation-adjusted increase of $2.2 billion from a decade earlier. Yet educational subsidies have fallen; the church now pays at least 12.6 percent of parochial elementary school costs, down from 63 percent in 1965.

Much of the money has gone to paying for a growing staff: about 170,000 laypeople, priests and members of religious orders, including some unpaid volunteers, responsible for more than 17,000 parishes. Since 2000, there has been more than a 25 percent increase in lay ecclesial ministers, who serve alongside priests and deacons in ministering to colleges, hospitals and prisons and caring for bereaved or homebound parishioners.

The church should shift its spending and also hold ambitious fund-raising drives. Instead of approaching donors with the least effective pitch — filling deficits — educators, pastors and prelates should propose new initiatives (with help from Web sites like DonorsChoose.org and Kickstarter) and new schools.

Bishops preach social justice but fail to practice it within the church. Thirty percent of American parishes report operating deficits, but there is no systemic means for wealthier dioceses and parishes to help poorer ones — and to stave off self-defeating tuition increases.

After finances, personnel is the biggest challenge. Once upon a time, a pastor and two assistant priests took care of religious duties, while nuns ran the parish schools. Now, typically, there is just a beleaguered pastor (increasingly born and trained in Asia, Africa or Latin America) without any experience in running the business side of a parish and a school. Priests’ collars and nuns’ habits have become rare sights in parochial schools.

One solution is at hand. In the late 1960s, the Vatican allowed men to be ordained as deacons, who are clergy with many but not all the powers of a priest. Today there are almost 17,000 in the United States, about the same number as active diocesan priests. Over the next decade, the diaconate will continue to grow, while the number of ordained priests is projected to decline to 12,500 by 2035.

Many deacons have valuable professional, managerial and entrepreneurial expertise that could revitalize parochial education. If they were given additional powers to perform sacraments and run parishes, a married priesthood would become a fait accompli. Celibacy should be a sacrifice offered freely, not an excuse for institutional suicide.

Without an overhaul of money and personnel, the future of Catholic education is grim. Since 1990, the church has closed almost 1,500 parishes. Most were small, but just as big-city parochial schools are being closed, thriving urban parishes may be next on the chopping block.

“The school is more necessary than the church,” said John J. Hughes, the first archbishop of New York. Unless the Vatican and the American bishops heed those words, the decline in parochial education may forewarn the fate of the church itself.

Patrick J. McCloskey,

a project director at the Center

for Catholic School Effectiveness

at Loyola University Chicago,

is the author of “The Street Stops Here:

A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem.”

Joseph Claude Harris is a financial analyst

and the author of

“The Cost of Catholic Parishes and Schools.”

    Catholic Education, in Need of Salvation, NYT, 6.1.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/opinion/
    catholic-education-in-need-of-salvation.html

12 States Get Failing Grades

on Public School Policies

From Advocacy Group

January 7, 2013
The New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH

In just a few short years, state legislatures and education agencies across the country have sought to transform American public education by passing a series of laws and policies overhauling teacher tenure, introducing the use of standardized test scores in performance evaluations and expanding charter schools.

Such policies are among those pushed by StudentsFirst, the advocacy group led by Michelle A. Rhee, the former schools chancellor in Washington. Ms. Rhee has generated debate in education circles for aggressive pursuit of her agenda and the financing of political candidates who support it.

In a report issued Monday, StudentsFirst ranks states based on how closely they follow the group’s platform, looking at policies related not only to tenure and evaluations but also to pensions and the governance of school districts. The group uses the classic academic grading system, awarding states A to F ratings.

With no states receiving an A, two states receiving B-minuses and 12 states branded with an F, StudentsFirst would seem to be building a reputation as a harsh grader.

Ms. Rhee said that the relatively weak showing reflected how recently statehouses had begun to address issues like tenure and performance evaluations. “We didn’t say in any way that we want to show people how bad it is,” she said in a telephone interview. “We wanted to show the progress that is being made, but in places where progress is slower to come, be very clear with leaders of that state what they could do to push the agenda forward and create a better environment in which educators, parents and kids can operate.”

The two highest-ranking states, Florida and Louisiana, received B-minus ratings. The states that were given F’s included Alabama, California, Iowa and New Hampshire. New Jersey and New York received D grades, and Connecticut a D-plus. The ratings, which focused purely on state laws and policies, did not take into account student test scores.

Some of the policies covered by the report card have been adopted by very few states. Only eight states, for example, require districts to base teacher pay on performance rather than on experience or the attainment of a master’s degree. StudentsFirst also recommends that districts make individual teacher evaluations available to parents and require that districts inform parents when their child is placed in the classroom of a teacher rated “ineffective.”

“What we strive to do through our policy agenda is put in place things that are very common-sense policies and take it down to the level of the regular Joe on the street,” Ms. Rhee said. “Do you believe that in a time of layoffs, quality should be looked at instead of straight seniority, or do you agree that if your child is being assigned to an ineffective teacher you should know about it?”

States that have adopted policies aligned with the StudentsFirst platform have in some cases met with public opposition. In Idaho, the Legislature passed a package in 2010 that eliminated tenure, introduced performance pay for teachers and based their evaluations on student test scores. Voters overturned the measures in a referendum in November. (The state received a D-minus grade from StudentsFirst.)

State officials who had seen their ratings reacted differently, with some viewing the StudentsFirst report as a kind of blueprint, others seeing it as an à la carte menu, and some spurning it outright.

Richard Zeiger, California’s chief deputy superintendent, called the state’s F rating a “badge of honor.”

“This is an organization that frankly makes its living by asserting that schools are failing,” Mr. Zeiger said of StudentsFirst. “I would have been surprised if we had got anything else.”

StudentsFirst gave California the low rating despite the fact that it has a so-called parent trigger law that the advocacy group favors. Such laws allow parents at underperforming schools to vote to change the leadership or faculty.

California was also denied a waiver last week by the federal Department of Education to the No Child Left Behind Law, in large part because the state has not passed a law requiring that districts use standardized test scores in evaluating teachers.

Although StudentsFirst’s report card does not explicitly state that standardized tests be used in teacher evaluations, the group says that “objective” measures of “student academic growth” must be a primary component.

“This group has focused on an extremely narrow, unproven method that they think will improve teaching,” Mr. Zeiger said. “And we just flat-out disagree with them.”

Officials from other states that received higher ratings have embraced evaluations that use student test scores as an important measure. Tony Bennett, the departing superintendent of schools in Indiana (StudentsFirst grade: C-plus), was voted out in the November election after introducing A-to-F ratings for schools as well as vouchers for students to use taxpayer dollars to attend private schools. He said he strongly supported using test scores to measure student learning and teacher performance.

But as he prepares to take over as Florida’s education commissioner next week, Dr. Bennett said that he and Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican, had discussed the public’s concerns about the state’s teacher evaluation law, including how much student test scores should figure into such ratings. “I believe evaluations should be multifaceted,” Dr. Bennett said. “I don’t believe it’s all one thing.”

In Louisiana, John White, the state superintendent, said that the state’s relatively high grade on the StudentsFirst report was an “indication of the boldness and the courage that our governor and our legislators and our people have shown in supporting policies that don’t accept the status quo.”

He added that Louisiana was focused on policy priorities, including reforming graduation requirements, strengthening prekindergarten programs and improving how teachers are trained and credentialed — measures not covered by StudentsFirst.

    12 States Get Failing Grades on Public School Policies From Advocacy Group, NYT, 7.1.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/education/studentsfirst-issues-low-ratings-on-school-policies.html

How to Choose a College

January 5, 2013

The New York Times

By FRANK BRUNI

MY niece Leslie is still more than nine months away from sending in a college application and more than 18 from stepping into her first college class, but already she’s swimming in numbers: the average SAT scores for one university’s student body; the percentage of applicants another school admits; how much money, on average, the graduates of yet another school tend to make once they’ve been in the work force awhile. This is the kind of information spotlighted in the articles and books that are supposed to guide her and her peers. These are the types of factoids that the adults around them often focus on.

Which school will bequeath the best network? Which diploma has the most cachet? Various relatives pitch Leslie on the virtues of their alma maters, and as surely as my niece swims in numbers, she drowns in advice. But much of it strikes me as shortsighted and incomplete, and I worry that she’ll be coaxed to make her choice in a way that disregards the inimitable opportunity that college presents, the full bounty and splendor of those potentially transformative years. I have the same worry about other secondary-school students who, like her, possess the economic and intellectual good fortune — and the hard-won transcripts — to entertain a wealth of alternatives, because I think we let them get too distracted by rankings, ratings, brands. We don’t point them toward assessments and dynamics that are arguably more meaningful.

Last week was the deadline to apply to many colleges and universities, though the admissions dance — the dreaming, scheming, waiting and worrying — has really become a year-round, nonstop phenomenon, starting well before the final stretch of high school. Leslie’s a junior and has already visited half a dozen campuses, to see how they feel.

And if she’s like most of my peers when I was her age, she’ll wind up picking one that gives her a sense of comfort, of safety. That’s what too many kids do. They perpetuate what they’re familiar with, gravitating to the same schools that their friends are or duplicating their parents’ paths. And there’s so much lost in that reflex, so much surrendered by that timidity.

If you’re among the lucky who can factor more than cost and proximity into where you decide to go, college is a ticket to an adventure beyond the parameters of what you’ve experienced so far. It’s a passport to the far side of what you already know. It’s a chance to be challenged, not coddled. To be provoked, not pacified.

Does brand matter? To a point. There are indeed future employers who see certain diplomas as seals of approval, as pre-screening of a sort, and there are many successful people who got that way by milking contacts made at storied universities. But there are just as many who prospered without the imprimatur of one of the hyper-exclusive schools near the top of the annual U.S. News & World Report list. And even if you’re confining yourself to those schools, you can and should ask questions about them that prospective freshmen frequently don’t.

How many of a college’s or university’s students are coming from other countries? Favor schools with higher percentages of foreigners, because as much of your education will happen outside as inside any lecture hall, and globalism is here and real. The dexterity with which you can navigate other cultures — your awareness of, and openness to, them — could be more valuable and happy-making than any knowledge gleaned from a book.

When it comes to the internationalism of a school, don’t assume the loftiest ones win the race. In one measure of this, Carnegie Mellon, Boston University and Brandeis came out ahead of Harvard, Stanford, Williams or Duke.

You might also take into account what percentage of a school’s students travel in the opposite direction and do some study abroad. That could be an indication of your future classmates’ daring or curiosity, and those classmates will presumably bring the fruits of their experiences back to campus. According to U.S. News & World Report, of the 41 schools that claim to have sent more than 50 percent of their students to a study-abroad program, only one, Dartmouth, is in the Ivy League.

I use the word “claim” deliberately and urge skepticism with rankings. They depend on honest reporting from schools, and in recent years both Claremont McKenna College and Emory University were forced to admit inflation in what they’d trumpeted about the test scores or other achievements of their students. Also, what does “study abroad” mean? A semester or a week, and in Mumbai or just Montreal? As it happens, more than half of the American college students who take an academic detour from the United States still head to Europe, and the most popular destination is Britain, according to the Institute of International Education. They’re not exactly honing new language skills there.

SO dig as deeply as you can into what the statistics that colleges showcase do and don’t assure. And treat your undergraduate education as a rare license, before you’re confined by the burdens of full-fledged adulthood and before the costs of experimentation rise, to be tugged outside your comfort zone. To be yanked, preferably. If you’ve spent little time in the thick of a busy city, contemplate a school in precisely such a place. If you know only the North, think about the South. Seek diversity, not just in terms of nationality, ethnicity and race, but also in terms of financial background, especially if your bearings have been resolutely and narrowly upper middle class. You’ll most likely encounter a different economic cross-section of classmates at one of the top state universities than you will at a small private college. Doesn’t that have merit, and shouldn’t that be weighed?

And if your interests and circumstances don’t demand an immediate concentration on one field of study, go somewhere that’ll force you to stretch in multiple directions. (A core curriculum isn’t a bad thing at all.) The world is in constant flux, life is a sequence of surprises, and I can think of no better talents to pick up in college than fearlessness, nimbleness and the ability to roll with change, adapt to newness and improvise.

I have 11 nieces and nephews in all. There are 10 younger than Leslie. I hope all of them have the options that she seems to, and I hope they ask themselves not which school is the surest route to riches but which will give them the richest experiences to draw from, which will broaden their frames of reference. College can shrink your universe, or college can expand it. I vote for the latter.

How to Choose a College,
NYT,
5.1.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/
opinion/sunday/bruni-how-to-choose-a-college.html