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History > 2015 > USA > Education
Ben Wiseman
An Admissions Surprise From the Ivy League
NYT
OCT. 17, 2015
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/
opinion/sunday/an-admissions-surprise-from-the-ivy-league.html
How Texas Teaches History
OCT. 21, 2015
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
By ELLEN BRESLER ROCKMORE
A TEXAS high school student and his mother recently called
attention to a curious line in a geography textbook: a description of the
Atlantic slave trade as bringing “millions of workers” to plantations in the
American South. McGraw-Hill Education, the publisher of the textbook, has since
acknowledged that the term “workers” was a misnomer.
The company’s chief executive also promised to revise the textbook so that its
digital version as well as its next edition would more accurately describe the
forced migration and enslavement of Africans. In the meantime, the company is
also offering to send stickers to cover the passage.
But it will take more than that to fix the way slavery is taught in Texas
textbooks. In 2010, the Texas Board of Education approved a social studies
curriculum that promotes capitalism and Republican political philosophies. The
curriculum guidelines prompted many concerns, including that new textbooks would
downplay slavery as the cause of the Civil War.
This fall, five million public school students in Texas began using the
textbooks based on the new guidelines. And some of these books distort history
not through word choices but through a tool we often think of as apolitical:
grammar.
In September, Bobby Finger of the website Jezebel obtained and published some
excerpts from the new books, showing much of what is objectionable about their
content. The books play down the horror of slavery and even seem to claim that
it had an upside. This upside took the form of a distinctive African-American
culture, in which family was central, Christianity provided “hope,” folk tales
expressed “joy” and community dances were important social events.
But it is not only the substance of the passages that is a problem. It is also
their form. The writers’ decisions about how to construct sentences, about what
the subject of the sentence will be, about whether the verb will be active or
passive, shape the message that slavery was not all that bad.
I teach freshman writing at Dartmouth College. My colleagues and I consistently
try to convey to our students the importance of clear writing. Among the guiding
principles of clear writing are these: Whenever possible, use human subjects,
not abstract nouns; use active verbs, not passive. We don’t want our students to
write, “Torture was used,” because that sentence obscures who was torturing
whom.
In the excerpts published by Jezebel, the Texas textbooks employ all the
principles of good, strong, clear writing when talking about the “upside” of
slavery. But when writing about the brutality of slavery, the writers use all
the tricks of obfuscation. You can see all this at play in the following passage
from a textbook, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, called Texas United
States History:
Some slaves reported that their masters treated them kindly. To protect their
investment, some slaveholders provided adequate food and clothing for their
slaves. However, severe treatment was very common. Whippings, brandings, and
even worse torture were all part of American slavery.
Notice how in the first two sentences, the “slavery wasn’t that bad” sentences,
the main subject of each clause is a person: slaves, masters, slaveholders. What
those people, especially the slave owners, are doing is clear: They are treating
their slaves kindly; they are providing adequate food and clothing. But after
those two sentences there is a change, not just in the writers’ outlook on
slavery but also in their sentence construction. There are no people in the last
two sentences, only nouns. Yes, there is severe treatment, whippings, brandings
and torture. And yes, those are all bad things. But where are the slave owners
who were actually doing the whipping and branding and torturing? And where are
the slaves who were whipped, branded and tortured? They are nowhere to be found
in the sentence.
In another passage, slave owners and their institutionalized cruelty are
similarly absent: “Families were often broken apart when a family member was
sold to another owner.”
Note the use of the passive voice in the verbs “were broken apart” and “was
sold.” If the sentence had been written according to the principles of good
draftsmanship, it would have looked like this: Slave owners often broke slave
families apart by selling a family member to another owner. A bit more powerful,
no? Through grammatical manipulation, the textbook authors obscure the role of
slave owners in the institution of slavery.
It may appear at first glance that the authors do a better job of focusing on
the actions of slaves. After all, there are many sentences in which “slaves” are
the subjects, the main characters in their own narrative. But what are the verbs
in those sentences? Are the slaves suffering? No, in the sentences that feature
slaves as the subject, as the main actors in the sentence, the slaves are
contributing their agricultural knowledge to the growing Southern economy; they
are singing songs and telling folk tales; they are expressing themselves through
art and dance.
There are no sentences, in these excerpts, anyway, in which slaves are doing
what slaves actually did: toiling relentlessly, without remuneration or
reprieve, constantly subject to confinement, corporal punishment and death.
The textbook publishers were put in a difficult position. They had to teach
history to Texas’ children without challenging conservative political views that
are at odds with history. In doing so, they made many grammatical choices.
Though we don’t always recognize it, grammatical choices can be moral choices,
and these publishers made the wrong ones.
Ellen Bresler Rockmore is a lecturer in the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric
at Dartmouth.
How Texas Teaches History,
NYT, OCT. 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/opinion/how-texas-teaches-history.html
An Admissions Surprise
From the Ivy League
OCT. 17, 2015
The New York Times
SundayReview | Op-Ed Columnist
AS the country struggles to address extreme income inequality and
inadequate social mobility, the most venerated colleges are increasingly
examining their piece of that puzzle: How can they better identify and enroll
gifted, promising students from low-income families, lessening the degree to
which campuses perpetuate privilege and making them better engines of
advancement?
That discussion just took an interesting turn.
About three weeks ago, a group of more than 80 colleges — including all eight in
the Ivy League and many other highly selective private and public ones —
announced that they were developing a free website and set of online tools that
would, among other things, inform ninth and 10th graders without savvy college
advisers about the kind of secondary-school preparation that best positions them
for admission.
What’s more, these colleges plan to use the website for an application process,
in place by next fall, that would be separate from, and competitive with, the
“Common App,” a single form students can submit to any of more than 600 schools.
If colleges in the new group — which calls itself the Coalition for Access,
Affordability and Success — have been taking the Common App, they would continue
to, but would clearly be encouraging students to explore this alternate route.
If you know anything about the frenzied, freaked-out world of college admissions
these days, you can imagine how much commotion this development generated among
obsessed parents, overburdened guidance counselors and others caught up in the
whorl. It was something to behold.
It also revealed curious logic at the pinnacles of higher education.
Unlike many of this new coalition’s harshest critics, I trust that the schools
involved really do want to diversify their student bodies, which don’t reflect
American society.
But like those critics, I wonder how the new application process will accomplish
this and whether it would be more effective to adopt less complicated, confusing
strategies.
First, some context, along with details about what the coalition is proposing:
As it stands now, the country’s most selective colleges are
dominated by students from affluent backgrounds. As my Times colleague David
Leonhardt noted in a recent article: “For every student from the entire bottom
half of the nation’s income distribution at Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, Yale and
more than a few other colleges, there appear to be roughly two students from
just the top 5 percent (which means they come from families making at least
$200,000).”
During the 2013-14 academic year, the most recent time period for which figures
were available, 38 percent of undergraduates nationally received federal Pell
grants, reserved for students from low-income families.
In the Ivy League, the percentage ranged from 12 (Yale) to 21 (Columbia),
according to the National Center for Education Statistics. While 31 percent of
students at the University of California, Berkeley, received Pell grants, just
13 percent at the University of Virginia did.
Such low percentages largely reflect the flawed education and support systems
that too many underprivileged kids in this country encounter. These children
don’t have the academic grounding, transcripts and test scores that their
wealthier counterparts do, frequently because they haven’t attended schools of
commensurate quality.
From preschool through 12th grade, we’ve failed them. We can hardly expect
higher education to rush in belatedly and save the day.
At the same time, there’s evidence that talented kids from low-income families
who could handle the work at leading colleges and get ample financial aid often
don’t realize it. And there are aspects of those colleges’ admissions processes
that work against them.
Members of the new coalition say that they are trying to change that and to
“unlock some of the mystery of what it means to apply to any institution,” in
the words of Zina Evans, the vice president for enrollment management and
associate provost at the University of Florida, whom I spoke with last week. I
spoke as well with admissions officials at Yale and at Smith College, which,
like Florida, belong to the coalition.
They said that the new online tools are meant to be one-stop shopping for
information about financial aid, application requirements and more. Students
could also use this online platform to interact with top schools, sending
inquiries and receiving answers.
The platform would include a so-called “locker” for creative work — essays,
videos, drawings — that students would be encouraged to begin filling in the
ninth grade, as a reminder that college is on the horizon.
They could share those lockers with mentors. And come application time, they
could upload its contents for admissions officers.
The platform would additionally serve as an application portal to colleges in
the coalition, which would be able to customize their individual demands more
easily than they do with any supplements to the Common App that they currently
require.
If you’re asking how this makes applying to college easier for poor kids, you’re
right to, and you’re in a mind meld with many confused and skeptical college
counselors and higher-education experts.
They predicted that privileged kids with hovering parents would interpret the
coalition’s suggestion about beginning to fill a locker in the ninth grade as
yet another reason to turn the entire high school experience into a calculated,
pragmatic audition for college admissions officers.
Meanwhile, underprivileged kids, lacking the necessary guidance and awareness,
might never take advantage of the platform.
“We have to make sure we give them the resources,” said Emmanuel Moses, the
senior manager of college guidance at the Opportunity Network, which nurtures
underprivileged kids to and through college. In other words, a set of online
tools to be used with mentors won’t do much good if there aren’t mentors to use
them with.
Coalition members conceded that they hadn’t fully figured out that part but said
they were determined to. “That’s the core challenge,” Audrey Smith, the vice
president for enrollment at Smith College, told me.
The coalition’s composition also contradicts its message of unimpeded, universal
access. Partly because the coalition is limited to schools with six-year
graduation rates of at least 70 percent, it’s a league mostly of exclusive
schools that seem to be distinguishing themselves from the pack. That has led
some critics to question its stated motives.
“A group of America’s most high-profile private colleges, already obsessed with
prestige, are attempting to grab more,” wrote Jon Boeckenstedt, the associate
vice president of enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University in
Chicago, in The Washington Post. DePaul does not belong to the coalition.
He added that they were “making hollow promises to low-income kids they could
already serve if they really wanted to.”
When I spoke with him last week, he went even further.
“I think the Common App has become much too common for some of these people,” he
said, referring to coalition members. “I think it completely offends their
vanity.”
Whatever the case, there’s much about their admissions criteria that runs
counter to the enrollment of underprivileged children, and it’s unclear if the
new online platform and application process would really fix that.
High scores on the SAT or ACT correlate with high family income, in part because
performance on these tests can be improved with the special classes and private
tutoring that money buys. That was one reason cited by Hampshire College when it
announced last year that it would stop collecting applicants’ scores and would
go unranked by U.S. News & World Report, which factors in those numbers.
Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, The Times
editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.
A transcript brimming with Advanced Placement classes is a testament to the
applicant, yes — but also to the resources of the secondary school that offered
a broad menu of such classes. And students from certain backgrounds and school
districts are more likely than those from others to have hands-on help rounding
up the perfect letters of recommendation, orchestrating an attention-getting
extracurricular dossier and even writing impressive essays.
Regarding essays, Jeremiah Quinlan, the dean of undergraduate admissions at
Yale, conceded his concern that “there’s a lot of work being done on personal
statements that’s decreasing their value in the admissions process.”
If the locker and other features of the new platform wind up giving
disadvantaged kids additional, untraditional ways to show their mettle, it may
turn out to be a step in the right direction. But the schools in the coalition
need a more detailed plan than they’ve articulated for making sure that those
kids know about the platform and how it can benefit them.
Any rethinking of the status quo of admissions is terrific. The same goes for
any spotlight on the dearth of diversity at many exclusive schools. I just hope
the members of the coalition accomplish more, in the end, than merely
illuminating education’s inequities.
I invite you to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni
and join me on Facebook.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 18, 2015, on page SR3 of the
New York edition with the headline:
An Ivy League Twist.
An Admissions Surprise From the Ivy League,
NYT, OCT. 17, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/
opinion/sunday/an-admissions-surprise-from-the-ivy-league.html
How Common Core
Can Help in the Battle of Skills
vs. Knowledge
AUG. 28, 2015
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
By NATALIE WEXLER
Washington — STANDARDIZED tests are commonly blamed for narrowing
the school curriculum to reading and math. That’s one reason Congress is
considering changes in the law that could lead states to put less emphasis on
test scores. But even if we abolished standardized tests tomorrow, a majority of
elementary schools would continue to pay scant attention to subjects like
history and science.
Consider this: In 1977, 25 years before No Child Left Behind ushered in the era
of high-stakes testing, elementary school teachers spent only about 50 minutes a
day on science and social studies combined. True, in 2012, they spent even less
time on those subjects — but only by about 10 minutes.
The root cause of today’s narrow elementary curriculum isn’t testing, although
that has exacerbated the trend. It’s a longstanding pedagogical notion that the
best way to teach kids reading comprehension is by giving them skills —
strategies like “finding the main idea” — rather than instilling knowledge about
things like the Civil War or human biology.
Many elementary students spend hours practicing skills-based strategies, reading
a book about zebras one day and a story about wizards the next, flitting among
subjects.
That’s a problem for all students: Spending hours finding the main idea can get
pretty boring. But it’s a particular problem for low-income students, because
they’re the least likely to acquire the kind of knowledge they need at home.
Skills are important. However, as the cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham
and others have demonstrated, you can’t improve reading comprehension just by
practicing free-floating skills. For students to understand what they’re
reading, they need relevant background knowledge and vocabulary.
The education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr. has argued for 30 years that elementary
schools need to focus on knowledge. Mr. Hirsch’s ideas were long dismissed as
encouraging a reactionary cultural tradition, but they are now beginning to
command new respect among education reformers. And that’s largely because of the
new Common Core education standards, currently in effect in more than 40 states
and the District of Columbia.
While critics blame the Common Core for further narrowing curriculums, the
authors of the standards actually saw them as a tool to counteract that trend.
They even included language stressing the importance of “building knowledge
systematically.”
But that language has gone largely unnoticed. The standards themselves — and the
Common Core-aligned tests that many students nationwide first took this past
spring — don’t specify what knowledge students should learn in each grade,
because they’re designed to be used across the country. And in the United
States, a school’s curriculum is a matter of local control. Most educators,
guided by the standards alone, have continued to focus on skills.
As Mr. Willingham has argued, all reading comprehension tests are really
“knowledge tests in disguise.” Rather than assessing kids on material they’ve
actually been taught, the tests give them passages and questions on a seemingly
random assortment of topics. The more general knowledge a student has, the
better her chances.
The old tests, which varied from state to state, were generally easier to game —
for example, by eliminating obviously wrong multiple choice answers. The new
tests ask students to read more sophisticated passages and then cite evidence
from them in their answers. That’s hard to do if you don’t have enough knowledge
to understand the passages in the first place.
The advantages of a knowledge-rich curriculum aren’t just a matter of
speculation. A foundation started by Mr. Hirsch in 1986 has developed just such
a curriculum, Core Knowledge Language Arts, that is used in elementary schools
across the country. A recent pilot program in New York City public schools
showed that elementary students in schools that used C.K.L.A. outperformed their
peers in reading, science and social studies.
More recently, we’ve seen evidence that a knowledge-focused curriculum can lead
to better results on Common Core-aligned tests, which New York began using two
years ago. Two high-performing charter networks in New York City — Success
Academy and Icahn — both rely on a content-rich approach.
Some charter schools and traditional public school districts across the country
have started to retool their approach. New York State has developed a free
online curriculum that has been downloaded nearly 20 million times.
More schools may follow suit if scores from the spring tests, set to arrive this
fall, plummet, even for many schools that were previously considered
high-achieving. But engineering the switch from skills to knowledge will take
real effort.
Schools will need to develop coherent curriculums and adopt different ways of
training teachers and evaluating progress. Because the federal government can’t
simply mandate a focus on knowledge, change will need to occur piecemeal, at the
state, school district or individual school level.
While standardized tests didn’t cause the curriculum to narrow, they’re a useful
reminder that some students have acquired a lot less knowledge than others. But
if we want to finally begin to remedy that, we can’t just teach the skills the
tests seem to call for.
Natalie Wexler writes about public education in Washington, D.C., at DC Eduphile
and Greater Greater Washington.
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for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 28, 2015, on page A23 of the
New York edition with the headline: What Our Kids Really Need to Know.
How Common Core Can Help in the Battle of Skills vs. Knowledge,
AUG. 28, 2015, NYT,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/opinion/
how-common-core-can-help-in-the-battle-of-skills-vs-knowledge.html
Stop Universities From Hoarding Money
AUG. 19, 2015
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
By VICTOR FLEISCHER
SAN DIEGO — WHO do you think received more cash from Yale’s
endowment last year: Yale students, or the private equity fund managers hired to
invest the university’s money?
It’s not even close.
Last year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers as
compensation — about $137 million in annual management fees, and another $343
million in performance fees, also known as carried interest — to manage about $8
billion, one-third of Yale’s endowment.
In contrast, of the $1 billion the endowment contributed to the university’s
operating budget, only $170 million was earmarked for tuition assistance,
fellowships and prizes. Private equity fund managers also received more than
students at four other endowments I researched: Harvard, the University of
Texas, Stanford and Princeton.
Endowments are exempt from corporate income tax because universities support the
advancement and dissemination of knowledge. But instead of holding down tuition
or expanding faculty research, endowments are hoarding money. Private
foundations are required to spend at least 5 percent of assets each year.
Similarly, we should require universities to spend at least 8 percent of their
endowments each year.
University endowments have surged in recent years as markets recovered from the
financial crisis. Yale’s endowment now tops $24 billion, up 50 percent from
2009.
Income inequality has left elite endowments heaving with cash. Following the
tradition of Gilded Age philanthropists like Rockefeller, Carnegie and
Vanderbilt, financiers are steering large charitable gifts to elite
universities.
Kenneth C. Griffin, a hedge fund manager, gave Harvard $150 million in 2014. In
May of this year, Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chairman and co-founder of the
private equity giant Blackstone, pledged $150 million to Yale toward a new
student center. John A. Paulson, another hedge fund manager, topped them both
when he gave Harvard $400 million in June.
While nobody has suggested that quid pro quos were involved in these cases,
these gifts highlight the symbiotic relationship between university endowments
and the world of hedge funds and private equity funds.
Investors compensate fund managers through an arrangement known as “2 and 20,”
referring to a 2 percent annual management fee and a 20 percent share of the
investment profits, or carried interest.
The arrangement is doubly beneficial, from a tax perspective: Many institutional
investors, including universities, are tax-exempt, and fund managers’ carried
interest is taxed at lower capital gains rates instead of ordinary income rates.
Universities won’t disclose the amount of carried interest paid to fund
managers. But one can estimate the amount by hand-collecting data from annual
reports, financial statements and tax forms, as I did for the Yale figures
above.
Despite the success of its endowment, in 2014 Yale charged its students $291
million, net of scholarships, for tuition, room and board.
In 2012, Harvard spent about $242 million from its endowment on tuition
assistance; in 2014, it paid $362 million in private-equity fees, and nearly $1
billion in total investment management fees.
Smaller institutions aren’t any better. The University of San Diego, where I
teach, spent about $2 million from the endowment on tuition assistance in 2012,
compared with $5 million in private-equity fees in 2014 and $13 million in
overall investment management fees.
Endowment managers argue that premium fees offer premium performance. It’s true
that, over the past 20 years, under the brilliant guidance of its chief
investment officer, David F. Swensen, Yale’s private-equity portfolio earned an
astounding 36 percent per year. It’s also true that Yale’s financial aid policy
is generous, and that Yale spends money from its endowment on things that
benefit students indirectly, like buildings, faculty salaries and research. In
the 2014 fiscal year, Yale’s endowment provided $830 million for expenses
including funding professorships, subsidizing research and maintenance.
But the amount universities pay to private equity reveals the deeper problem:
We’ve lost sight of the idea that students, not fund managers, should be the
primary beneficiaries of a university’s endowment. The private-equity folks get
cash; students take out loans.
As part of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act expected later this
year, Congress should require universities with endowments in excess of $100
million to spend at least 8 percent of the endowment each year. Universities
could avoid this rule by shrinking assets to $99 million, but only by spending
the endowment on educational purposes, which is exactly the goal.
Eight percent is not as scary as it might sound. Remember that endowments
benefit from new gifts as well as investment returns. The average endowment,
small or large, has grown by 9.2 percent per year over the last 20 years, even
after accounting for annual spending of about 4 percent. Last year, only 14 of
the 447 university endowments with assets over $100 million failed to net at
least 8 percent growth.
Under my proposal, endowments would grow, only at a slower pace. They would
shrink when markets crash, but recover, and then some, when the market rebounds.
Think about it this way. In 1990, Yale’s endowment was worth about $3 billion.
If my suggested spending rule had been in place, it would be worth about $10
billion today, instead of $24 billion.
But under my proposal, the sky-high tuition increases would stop, and maybe even
reverse themselves. Faculty members would benefit from greater research support.
University libraries, museums, hospitals and laboratories would have better
facilities. Donors would see the tangible benefits of philanthropy. Only fund
managers would be worse off.
Victor Fleischer is a professor of law at the University of San
Diego.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 19, 2015,
on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Stop Colleges From
Hoarding Cash.
Stop Universities From Hoarding Money,
NYT, AUGUST 19, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/opinion/
stop-universities-from-hoarding-money.html
Can We Interest You In Teaching?
AUG. 12, 2015
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
Frank Bruni
Teaching can’t compete.
When the economy improves and job prospects multiply, college students turn
their attention elsewhere, to professions that promise more money, more
independence, more respect.
That was one takeaway from a widely discussed story in The Times on Sunday by
Motoko Rich, who charted teacher shortages so severe in certain areas of the
country that teachers are being rushed into classrooms with dubious
qualifications and before they’ve earned their teaching credentials.
It’s a sad, alarming state of affairs, and it proves that for all our lip
service about improving the education of America’s children, we’ve failed to
make teaching the draw that it should be, the honor that it must be. Nationally,
enrollment in teacher preparation programs dropped by 30 percent between 2010
and 2014, as Rich reported.
To make matters worse, more than 40 percent of the people who do go into
teaching exit the profession within five years.
How do we make teaching more rewarding, so that it beckons to not only enough
college graduates but to a robust share of the very best of them?
Better pay is a must. There’s no getting around that. Many teachers in many
areas can’t hope to buy a house and support a family on their incomes, and
college students contemplating careers know that. If those students are taking
on debt, teaching isn’t likely to provide a timely way to pay it off. The
average salary nationally for public school teachers, including those with
decades in the classroom, is under $57,000; starting salaries in some states
barely crest $30,000.
There’s also the issue of autonomy.
“The No. 1 thing is giving teachers a voice, a real voice,” Randi Weingarten,
the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said to me this week.
Education leaders disagree over how much of a voice and in what. Weingarten
emphasizes teacher involvement in policy, and a survey of some 30,000 teachers
and other school workers done by the A.F.T. and the Badass Teachers Association
in late April showed that one large source of stress was being left out of such
decisions.
Others focus on primarily letting teachers chart the day-by-day path to the
goals laid out for them, so that they’re not just obedient vessels for a
one-size-fits-all script. Hold them accountable, but give them discretion.
The political battles over education, along with the shifting vogues about
what’s best, have left many teachers feeling like pawns and punching bags. And
while that’s no reason not to implement promising new approaches or to shrink
from experimentation, it puts an onus on policy makers and administrators to
bring generous measures of training, support and patience to the task.
Teachers crave better opportunities for career growth. Evan Stone, one of the
chief executives of Educators 4 Excellence, which represents about 17,000
teachers nationwide, called for “career ladders for teachers to move into
specialist roles, master-teacher roles.”
“They’re worried that they’re going to be doing the same thing on Day 1 as
they’ll be doing 30 years in,” he told me.
He also questioned licensing laws that prevent the easy movement of an exemplary
teacher from one state to another. Minnesota recently relaxed such requirements;
if other states followed suit, it might build a desirable new flexibility into
the profession.
Teaching also needs to be endowed with greater prestige. One intriguing line of
thought about how to do this is to make the requirements for becoming a teacher
more difficult, so that a teaching credential has luster. In the book “The
Smartest Kids in the World,” Amanda Ripley noted that Finland’s teachers are
revered in part because they’re the survivors of selective screening and
rigorous training.
Kate Walsh, the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, told me
that in this country, “It’s pretty firmly rooted in college students that
education is a fairly easy major.” Too often, it’s also “a major of last
resort,” she said.
Dan Brown, a co-director of Educators Rising, which encourages teenagers to
contemplate careers in the classroom, said that teaching might be ready for its
own Flexner Report, an early 1900s document that revolutionized medical schools
and raised the bar for American medicine, contributing to the aura that
surrounds physicians today.
He also asked why, in the intensifying political discussions about making
college more affordable, there’s not more talk of methods “to recognize and
incentivize future public servants,” foremost among them teachers.
There should be. The health of our democracy and the perpetuation of our
prosperity depend on teaching no less than they do on Wall Street’s machinations
or Silicon Valley’s innovations. So let’s make the classroom a destination as
sensible, exciting and fulfilling as any other.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 12, 2015,
on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Can We Interest You in
Teaching?
Can We Interest You In Teaching?,
NYT, AUGUST 12, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/opinion/
frank-bruni-can-we-interest-you-in-teaching.html
College for a New Age
MARCH 10, 2015
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
Kevin Carey has a 4-year-old girl. Carey, the director of the
education policy program at the New America Foundation, has been thinking about
the role of universities in American life for virtually his entire career. But
after his daughter was born, that thinking took on a new urgency.
“All of a sudden there is a mental clock,” he told me the other day. “How am I
going to pay for her college education? I wanted to write a book that asked,
‘What will college be like when my daughter is ready to go?’ ”
His answer is his new book, “The End of College,” which is both a stinging
indictment of the university business model and a prediction about how
technology is likely to change it. His vision is at once apocalyptic and
idealistic. He calls it “The University of Everywhere.”
“The story of higher education’s future is a tale of ancient institutions in
their last days of decadence, creating the seeds of a new world to come,” he
writes. If he is right, higher education will be transformed into a different
kind of learning experience that is cheaper, better, more personalized and more
useful.
Universities in their current form have been with us for so long that it is
difficult to imagine them operating any other way. But Carey begins “The End of
College” by making a persuasive case that the university model has long been
deeply flawed. It has three different missions: “practical training, research
and liberal arts education.” Over time, the mission that came to matter most
within the university culture was research. Great research institutions derived
the most status. And professors who did significant research — publish or
perish! — were the ones who reaped the rewards of the university system.
On the other hand, actual teaching, which is what the students — and their
parents — are paying for, is scarcely valued at all. There is also the absurd
importance of the football team. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent to
create an ever newer, ever fancier campus. The outmoded idea that college should
cater to students just out of high school, even though a significant portion of
students are in different stages of life.
And, of course, there is the cost. Student debt now tops $1 trillion, and Carey
spoke to students who were going to graduate with more than $100,000 of debt, a
terrible burden at the beginning of one’s career. Schools like George Washington
University and New York University became top-tier universities in no small part
by aggressively raising their prices — which, in turn, became part of the reason
they are now considered prestigious universities.
Although Carey has long been aware of the flaws of the university model, it is
the out-of-control cost of college that he believes will cause people to search
for a different way to educate students. Indeed, much of the rest of his book is
devoted to the educators, scientists, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists who
are developing new ways to provide learning that make much more sense for many
more students. “You don’t need libraries and research infrastructure and
football teams and this insane race for status,” he says. “If you only have to
pay for the things that you actually need, education doesn’t cost $60,000 a
year.”
Carey spends a good chunk of “The End of College” exploring the new world of
online learning, for instance. To that end, he took an online course — problem
sets and exams included — offered by Eric Lander, the M.I.T. professor who was a
principal leader of the Human Genome Project. It was, he concludes, a better
experience than if he had sat in Lander’s classroom.
He expects that as more people take to online learning, the combination of
massive amounts of data and advances in artificial intelligence will make it
possible for courses to adapt to the way each student learns. He sees thousands
of people around the world taking the same course and developing peer groups
that become communities, like study groups at universities. “A larger and larger
percentage of the education that has been historically confined to scarce,
expensive colleges and universities will be liberated and made available to
anyone, anywhere.” That’s what I mean when I say his vision is an idealistic
one.
(Carey also believes that over time, new kinds of credentials will emerge that
will be accepted by employers, making it less necessary to get a traditional
college degree. He explored this subject for The Upshot, which was published in
Sunday Review in The Times over the weekend.)
When might all this take place? I asked him. He wasn’t ready to hazard a guess;
colleges are protected by government regulation, accreditation boards, and
cultural habit, among other things. But, he said, it was inevitable that we were
going to see an increased educational experience at a far lower cost.
Maybe he’ll even be able to stop saving for his daughter’s college education.
Maybe the rest of us will, too.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 10, 2015, on page A21 of the
New York edition with the headline: College for a New Age.
College for a New Age, NYT,
MARCH 10, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/opinion/joe-nocera-college-for-a-new-age.html
A Strike Against Student Debt
FEB. 27, 2015
The New York Times
By ASTRA TAYLOR
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
THIS week a group of former students calling themselves the
Corinthian 15 announced that they were committing a new kind of civil
disobedience: a debt strike. They are refusing to make any more payments on
their federal student loans.
Along with many others, they found themselves in significant debt after
attending programs at the Corinthian Colleges, a collapsed chain of for-profit
schools that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has accused of running a
“predatory lending scheme.” While the bureau has announced a plan to reduce some
of the students’ private loan debts, the strikers are demanding that the
Department of Education use its authority to discharge their federal loans as
well.
These 15 students are members of the Debt Collective, an organization that
evolved out of a project I helped start in 2012 called the Rolling Jubilee.
Until now, we have worked in the secondary debt market, using crowdfunded
donations to buy portfolios of medical and educational debts for pennies on the
dollar, just as debt collectors do.
Only, instead of collecting on them, we abolish them, operating under the belief
that people shouldn’t go into debt for getting sick or going to school. This
week, we erased $13 million of “unpaid tuition receivables” belonging to 9,438
people associated with Everest College, a Corinthian subsidiary.
But this approach has its limits. Federal loans, for example, are guaranteed by
the government, and debtors can be freed of them — via bankruptcy — only under
exceedingly rare circumstances. That means they aren’t sold at steep discounts
and remain out of our reach. What’s more, America’s mountain of student debt is
too immense for the Jubilee to make a significant dent in it.
Real change will require more organized actions like those taken by the
Corinthian 15.
If anyone deserves debt relief — morally and legally — it’s these students.
For-profit colleges are notorious for targeting low-income minorities, single
mothers and veterans with high-pressure, misleading recruitment techniques. The
schools slurp up about a quarter of all federal student aid money, more than $30
billion a year, while their students run up a lifetime of debt for a degree
arguably worth no more than a high school diploma.
But for-profit schools aren’t the only problem. Degrees earned from traditional
colleges can also leave students unfairly burdened.
Today, a majority of outstanding student loans are in deferral, delinquency or
default. As state funding for education has plummeted, public colleges have
raised tuition. Private university costs are skyrocketing, too, rising roughly
25 percent over the last decade. That’s why every class of graduates is more in
the red than the last.
Modest fixes are not enough. Consider the interest rate tweaks or income-based
repayment plans offered by the Obama administration. They lighten the debt
burden on some — but not everyone qualifies. They do nothing to address the $165
billion private loan market, where interest rates are often the most punishing,
or how higher education is financed.
Americans now owe $1.2 trillion in student debt, a number predicted by the think
tank Demos to climb to $2 trillion by 2025. What if more people from all types
of educational institutions and with all kinds of debts followed the example of
the Corinthian 15, and strategically refused to pay back their loans? This would
transform the debts into leverage to demand better terms, or even a better way
of funding higher education altogether.
The quickest fix would be a full-scale student debt cancellation. For students
at predatory colleges like Corinthian, this could be done immediately by the
Department of Education. For the broader population of students, it would most
likely take an act of Congress.
Student debt cancellation would mean forgone revenue in the near term, but in
the long term it could be an economic stimulus worth much more than the
immediate cost. Money not spent paying off loans would be spent elsewhere. In
that situation, lenders, debt collectors, servicers, guaranty agencies,
asset-backed security investors and others who profit from student loans would
suffer the most from debt forgiveness.
We also need to bring back the option of a public, tuition-free college
education once represented by institutions like the University of California,
which charged only token fees. By the Rolling Jubilee’s estimate, every public
two- and four-year college and university in the United States could be made
tuition-free by redirecting all current educational subsidies and tax exemptions
straight to them and adding approximately $15 billion in annual spending.
This might sound like a lot, but it’s a small price to pay to restore America’s
place on the long list of countries that provide tuition-free education.
To get there, more groups like the Corinthian 15 will have to show that they are
willing to throw a wrench in the gears of the system by threatening to withhold
payment on their debt. Everyone deserves a quality education. We need to come up
with a better way to provide it than debt and default.
Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker and the author of “The People’s
Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 28, 2015, on page A17 of
the New York edition with the headline: A Strike Against Student Debt.
A Strike Against Student Debt, NYT,
FEB. 27, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/opinion/a-strike-against-student-debt.html
At Princeton,
Women Make Strides
at Clubs That Once Barred Them
FEB. 20, 2015
The New York Times
By SPENCER PARTS
PRINCETON, N.J. — Princeton University’s 11 eating clubs are
where most of its upperclassmen go for dinner every night, as the name implies.
But the name also understates the significance of the clubs in the social lives
of Princeton students. Winning a leadership role is a sign of status and
achievement, and the clubs’ parties are widely considered the exclamation point
for the week.
One of the oldest clubs, Tiger Inn, has long carried a reputation for partying a
little harder than most. It also had, by many accounts, a reputation for
insensitivity to female students, and two of its officers were removed last fall
after sending emails that ridiculed women.
But this week, Tiger Inn made news of a different sort: For the first time since
the university began admitting women in 1969, it elected a woman, Grace Larsen,
as its president.
Ivy Club, the oldest eating club, recently elected its second female president,
Eliza Mott. Ivy and Tiger Inn were the last two clubs to admit women, and only
did soon after a 1990 court order. Women are in charge at four of the clubs, the
highest total since 2002 and three more than last year.
Photo
Eliza Mott on campus at Princeton on Friday. Ms. Mott was the second woman
elected president of the Ivy Club. After being forced by court order in 1990,
Ivy Club admitted women members. Credit Jessica Kourkounis for The New York
Times
“I think the consensus that the club came to this year is that we’re
establishing a culture where women are running, and women are winning,” Liz
Lian, 22, a senior in Ivy from Chester, N.J., said.
Women at the university also recently won top spots in the Undergraduate Student
Government and the Daily Princetonian, the college newspaper.
The trajectory for women at Princeton, however, has not been steady. A 2011
report on women’s leadership at the university, whose student body is evenly
divided between the sexes, found that “there has been a pronounced drop-off in
the representation of women in these prominent posts since 2000.”
The report attributed the imbalance to factors that included a tendency for
women to undersell themselves, and to seek important roles in smaller
organizations or high-responsibility but low-profile roles in larger ones. Some
women also were discouraged from seeking high-profile positions.
While women at Princeton in the early days of coeducation felt a need to prove
themselves, the report said, that feeling had faded. The report said that
encouraging women to become leaders on campus would make them more comfortable
with leadership, and called for mentor programs.
“It’s an important thing to have female representation,” said Ms. Mott, 20, of
Grosse Pointe, Mich., the president of Ivy Club. “Perceptions change and new
precedents are set.”
Ms. Mott, who is studying art history, is also the president of SpeakOut
Princeton, a student organization that discusses sexual violence and consent on
campus, an issue preoccupying colleges nationwide.
Princeton is no exception — the university was found in violation of Title IX
regulations regarding its handling of sexual harassment and assault complaints
last fall. The eating clubs, which are privately owned but often work with the
administration, have focused on addressing issues of sexual misconduct, said
Joseph Margolies, the student president of the Interclub Council, a group that
coordinates efforts between the clubs. He added that leadership roles for women
were part of that discussion.
New urgency was given to the effort in December, when Tiger Inn removed the two
officers for sending the emails. One email contained a sexually explicit
photograph; the other took aim at Sally Frank, the alumna whose lawsuit forced
Tiger Inn to admit women. Around the time those emails circulated, someone
painted the words “rape haven” on the club’s stone fence.
The stumbles led Tiger Inn’s graduate board, which oversees the club, to work to
change how members and officers are chosen.
“We had some challenges in the fall, and a lot of those challenges had to do
with a mind-set around gender issues,” Hap Cooper, 55, the president of the
graduate board, said.
This year, Tiger Inn accepted more women than men, a first in its history,
according to Mr. Cooper. All officers were elected — half used to be appointed —
and votes were cast via a more accountable online platform. In addition to Ms.
Larsen, two women and three men were also elected to officer positions.
“The grad board and the club worked as a group to achieve gender parity in the
election,” Mr. Cooper said.
But one student, who said she became disillusioned by the club and dropped out
of it this semester, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she
feared retribution from members, wondered if the changes were lasting or just
damage control.
The negative attention also resulted in the club’s advocates for female
leadership being taken more seriously, she said. “Now these people have more of
a voice,” she said. “Before they would have been laughed out of town.”
Ivy’s elections also resulted in a gender-balanced group of officers, which had
not happened in recent years. Ms. Mott said that she was excited about that, and
encouraged by the opportunities for change given the short institutional memory
of the club.
Also buoyed by the results was Ms. Frank, now 55, the woman who took on the
male-only clubs and won.
“It’s extremely gratifying,” she said. “The election isn’t going to end all
sexism on Princeton’s campus. But it can help.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 21, 2015, on page A15 of
the New York edition with the headline: At Princeton, Women Make Strides at
Clubs That Once Barred Them.
At Princeton, Women Make Strides at Clubs That Once Barred Them,
NYT,
FEB. 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/21/nyregion/in-potential-shift-women-are-running-and-winning-leadership-roles-at-princeton.html
Can Students Have Too Much Tech?
JAN. 30, 2015
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
By SUSAN PINKER
PRESIDENT OBAMA’s domestic agenda, which he announced in his
State of the Union address this month, has a lot to like: health care, maternity
leave, affordable college. But there was one thing he got wrong. As part of his
promise to educate American children for an increasingly competitive world, he
vowed to “protect a free and open Internet” and “extend its reach to every
classroom and every community.”
More technology in the classroom has long been a policy-making panacea. But
mounting evidence shows that showering students, especially those from
struggling families, with networked devices will not shrink the class divide in
education. If anything, it will widen it.
In the early 2000s, the Duke University economists Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd
tracked the academic progress of nearly one million disadvantaged middle-school
students against the dates they were given networked computers. The researchers
assessed the students’ math and reading skills annually for five years, and
recorded how they spent their time. The news was not good.
“Students who gain access to a home computer between the 5th and 8th grades tend
to witness a persistent decline in reading and math scores,” the economists
wrote, adding that license to surf the Internet was also linked to lower grades
in younger children.
In fact, the students’ academic scores dropped and remained depressed for as
long as the researchers kept tabs on them. What’s worse, the weaker students
(boys, African-Americans) were more adversely affected than the rest. When their
computers arrived, their reading scores fell off a cliff.
We don’t know why this is, but we can speculate. With no adults to supervise
them, many kids used their networked devices not for schoolwork, but to play
games, troll social media and download entertainment. (And why not? Given their
druthers, most adults would do the same.)
The problem is the differential impact on children from poor families. Babies
born to low-income parents spend at least 40 percent of their waking hours in
front of a screen — more than twice the time spent by middle-class babies. They
also get far less cuddling and bantering over family meals than do more
privileged children. The give-and-take of these interactions is what predicts
robust vocabularies and school success. Apps and videos don’t.
If children who spend more time with electronic devices are also more likely to
be out of sync with their peers’ behavior and learning by the fourth grade, why
would adding more viewing and clicking to their school days be considered a good
idea?
An unquestioned belief in the power of gadgetry has already led to educational
snafus. Beginning in 2006, the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project envisioned
a digital utopia in which all students over 6 years old, worldwide, would own
their own laptops. Impoverished children would thus have the power to go online
and educate themselves — no school or teacher required. With laptops for poor
children initially priced at $400, donations poured in.
But the program didn’t live up to the ballyhoo. For one thing, the machines were
buggy and often broke down. And when they did work, the impoverished students
who received free laptops spent more time on games and chat rooms and less time
on their homework than before, according to the education researchers Mark
Warschauer and Morgan Ames. It’s drive-by education — adults distribute the
laptops and then walk away.
It’s true that there is often an initial uptick in students’ engagement with
their studies — interactive apps can be fun. But the novelty wears off after a
few months, said Larry Cuban, an emeritus education professor at Stanford.
Technology does have a role in education. But as Randy Yerrick, a professor of
education at the University at Buffalo, told me, it is worth the investment only
when it’s perfectly suited to the task, in science simulations, for example, or
to teach students with learning disabilities.
And, of course, technology can work only when it is deployed as a tool by a
terrific, highly trained teacher. As extensive research shows, just one year
with a gifted teacher in middle school makes it far less likely that a student
will get pregnant in high school, and much more likely that she will go to
college, earn a decent salary, live in a good neighborhood and save for
retirement. To the extent that such a teacher can benefit from classroom
technology, he or she should get it. But only when such teachers are effectively
trained to apply a specific application to teaching a particular topic to a
particular set of students — only then does classroom technology really work.
Even then, we still have no proof that the newly acquired, tech-centric skills
that students learn in the classroom transfer to novel problems that they need
to solve in other areas. While we’re waiting to find out, the public money spent
on wiring up classrooms should be matched by training and mentorship programs
for teachers, so that a free and open Internet, reached through constantly
evolving, beautifully packaged and compelling electronic tools, helps — not
hampers — the progress of children who need help the most.
Susan Pinker, a developmental psychologist and columnist, is the author, most
recently, of “The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make us
Healthier, Happier, and Smarter.”
Can Students Have Too Much Tech?,
NYT, JAN 30, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/opinion/can-students-have-too-much-tech.html
Expanding
Community College Access
JAN. 15, 2015
The New York
Times
The Opinion
Pages | Editorial
By THE
EDITORIAL BOARD
In the
abstract, President Obama’s proposal for making community college tuition-free
seems a reasonable response to a troublesome fact: The American work force is
less educated than it needs to be at a time when most jobs in the new economy
will require some college education. But for such an idea to work, states and
localities that have been starving community colleges for decades will need to
begin holding them to higher standards and commit to sustained financing instead
of using the new federal money to dodge their own financial obligations.
The president’s proposal deserves to be taken seriously by the public, state
legislatures, municipal authorities and, of course, Congress, which will be
asked to underwrite it. Although many details have yet to be worked out, the
preliminary plans released last week call for an estimated $60 billion in new
spending over 10 years to help cover tuition and fees for full-time and
half-time students who maintain a 2.5 grade point average — about a C-plus — and
who make consistent progress toward completion.
The program would help as many as nine million students and would be open to
colleges that offer credit toward a four-year degree or occupational training
programs that offer certificates or degrees in high-demand areas. The federal
government would cover three-quarters of the average cost of community college
for those students, and states that choose to participate would cover the
remainder. If all states participate, the administration estimates, the program
could save each full-time student an average of $3,800 a year.
Some argue that the program is unnecessary because community college, where
tuition averages about $3,330 a year, is reasonably priced and made even more so
by the federal Pell Grants available to poor and working-class students.
However, tuition accounts for only about one-fifth of the costs of attending a
community college. These costs — as defined by the federal guidelines — include
housing, food, books, transportation and other expenses. These are often
insurmountable expenses for community college students — about one in three come
from families with annual incomes below $20,000. Students, many of them
struggling academically to begin with, typically try to make up the shortfall by
working long hours. Their studies suffer, and they often drop out.
This is a particularly severe problem in urban community colleges, where the
three-year graduation rate hovers around 15 percent. But, as President Obama
pointed out in his announcement, efforts like the Accelerated Study in Associate
Programs at the City University of New York can dramatically increase student
success, as defined by graduation rates and the rate at which students move on
to four-year degrees. ASAP, which began in 2007, provides money for books,
coaching, tutoring, tuition waivers and transportation. Fifty-seven percent of
last year’s graduates finished in three years.
Despite higher upfront costs, the cost per ASAP graduate is actually lower than
it is for traditional students because students in the program move through the
system more quickly. One study found that for every dollar invested in ASAP,
$3.50 in tax revenues and unused social service benefits was gained.
As rules are written for the national program, the White House and Congress must
make sure that only institutions with a demonstrable commitment to helping
students graduate are rewarded. States should be required to sustain significant
investments in their community colleges, revise accrediting rules so that
community colleges are held to higher standards and make sure that students who
graduate from those colleges can easily transfer to public four-year schools.
The skepticism that has greeted Mr. Obama’s proposal in some quarters has
overtones of the skepticism that greeted 19th-century educators when they began
to agitate for free, universal public high schools. Their efforts proved crucial
at a time when the country was moving away from farming and toward a world in
which reading, writing and reasoning would be critical. Expanded access to
community college could do the same thing for the country in the information
age.
A version of this editorial appears in print on January 15, 2015, on page A28 of
the New York edition with the headline: Expanding Community College Access.
Expanding
Community College Access,
NYT, JAN 15, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/opinion/
expanding-community-college-access.html
|
