Black Migration – Escape from New York!

Dear Commons Community,

Charles M. Blow has a column in the NY Times today that highlights the results of the 2010 census (local New York data to be released next week) that will show that New York City’s black population  is declining.  If those data come in as expected, it will be the first drop in the black population of New York City on a census since at least 1880, according to our own Professor Andy Beveridge (Queens College). The white, Asian and Hispanic populations are all expected to grow.   Blow speculates that the reasons for the decline  include the loss of manufacturing jobs, and a migration of blacks back to the South as well as to the suburbs.  He also speculates that  another reason is the hostility between the NYC police and black males over the past ten years.  He quotes that there were a record 580,000 “stop-and-frisks” in the city in 2009. Most of those stopped (55 percent) were black, young and almost all were male.

Tony

 

 

 

University of Puerto Rico!

Dear Commons Community,

During the past five days I have been at the University of Puerto Rico – Bayamon on a Middle States accreditation visit.  It was quite an interesting experience.    A developing story that has been under the news radar is the ongoing student demonstrations at the University of Puerto Rico for the past year or so.  The situation was/is serious enough  that ten of the eleven  universities in the system were put on accreditation probation.  My work on the accreditation team precludes my discussing any details.  Suffice to say that this visit was one of the more serious evaluations that I have ever  had to do in my capacity as a  Middle States evaluator.

Tony

The Teaching Profession – Nicholas Kristof Column

Dear Commons Community,

Nicholas Kristof (NY Times) in his column, comments on the state of teachers pay in this country.  Partially in response to the attack on public unions in Wisconsin and elsewhere, Kristof presents several informed opinions on the need to elevate the teachers profession  including pay if we want to improve the American public education system.  For example:

“Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.

These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a September 2010 study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”

Kristof also discusses that part of compensation is public esteem. “When governors mock teachers as lazy, avaricious incompetents, they demean the profession and make it harder to attract the best and brightest. We should be elevating teachers, not throwing darts at them.”

He closes with:  “Consider three other countries renowned for their educational performance: Singapore, South Korea and Finland. In each country, teachers are drawn from the top third of their cohort, are hugely respected and are paid well (although that’s less true in Finland). In South Korea and Singapore, teachers on average earn more than lawyers and engineers, the McKinsey study found. “

Tony

University of Puerto Rico – Bayamon

 

Traveling – University of Puerto Rico

Dear Commons Colleagues,

For the next five days I will be at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) on a Middle States Evaluation visit and will have limited time to post to this blog.  UPR has a most important mission and serves well the higher education needs of the people of Puerto Rico.  In many ways, it is similar to CUNY.  However, during the past year, there have been several serious issues related to budget and student strife.    I made a brief posting on this a little while ago on this blog.   I look forward to my visit and to the work of the Middle States Team.

Tony

 

 

Arne Duncan: “No Child Left Behind Broken”!

Dear Commons Community,

Arne Duncan,  US Secretary of Education, has declared that the federal government’s signature program for K-12 education, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), is “fundamentally broken”. The problem is that under NCLB, eighty-two percent of the public schools in this country will be identified as failing within the next year under NCLB guidelines.  Educators have been warning of the perils of NCLB almost since its enactment by President George W. Bush and approved by a bipartisan US Congress ten years ago.   Duncan in as candid an address as possible stated:

“The law has created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed. We should get out of the business of labeling schools as failures and create a new law that is fair and flexible and focused on the schools and students most at risk.”

Thank you Mr. Secretary and please figure out some way to protect our children from the elected officials and governing bodies that passed this legislation in the first place.

Tony

 

New York’s Mayor, Schools Chancellor and Teachers Working Together- Really!

Dear Commons Community,

The NY Times is reporting today that the Schools Chancellor Katherine Black is considering a new (for New York City) approach for “turning around” two schools in the Bronx: replacing the principals and at least half of the teachers, but keeping the schools and all of their programs running.   The normal strategy for Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former schools Chancellor Joel Klein was to shut low-performing schools down, a drastic move that often incited anger and protests from teachers, parents and neighborhood officials. Since the beginning of the mayor’s first term, more than 110 schools have been shuttered or are in the process of closing.

The plan would bring together all the stakeholders including parents and the teachers union under the guidance of Green Dot Schools founder, Steve Barr, best known for turning around one of the toughest high schools in Los Angeles. This collaborative approach is long overdue in New York where for the past nine years there has been a “them against us” attitude perpetrated and embraced for the most part by the former Chancellor Joel Klein.

Children First Indeed!

Tony

 

New Orleans Losing its Children!

Dear Commons Community,

AOL News has an interesting feature article today on the decline of the ”under 18” population in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina.   The general population of New Orleans has declined by 29 percent since the 2000 census; the population of children below age 18 dropped 43 percent in the 2010 count. In the last decade, New Orleans lost 56,193 children.   “The Greater New Orleans Data Center found that the biggest losses were in neighborhoods with large public housing complexes, …but the decline was citywide. In all, 59 of the city’s 72 neighborhoods lost children”. While there is some reason for optimism as this great city continues to recover from Katrina, the numbers of children that have left surprised if not staggered many of its inhabitants.  As one resident alluded, If New Orleans loses its children, it loses its future.

Tony

Our Universities: How Good, How Bad!

Dear Commons Community,

There has been a fairly vibrant discussion occurring on the Hunter College LISTSERV regarding several recently published books commenting on American higher education and its effectiveness in teaching undergraduates.  Several colleagues (John Wallach, Manfred Kuechler, and Jack Kenigsberg) have referred to an article entitled, Our Universities:  How Good, How Bad? by Peter Brooks in the New York Review of Books, which compares four recent publications on the topic, three of which are fairly critical.  The books reviewed are:

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
University of Chicago Press, 259 pp., $70.00; $25.00 (paper)

Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It
by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus
Times Books, 271 pp., $26.00

Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities
by Mark C. Taylor
Knopf, 240 pp., $24.00

Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
by Martha C. Nussbaum
Princeton University Press, 158 pp., $22.95

Brooks sets the stage by establishing that the alleged or real “crisis” in higher education centers on:

”… the American university of failing to educate (variously, failing to train the mind and to prepare for the workplace), of losing its place in international competition, of being an institution top-heavy with administrators and pandering to a faculty that does very little, as well as to students who care more about expensive cars and state-of-the-art fitness rooms than about Socrates. Above all, the university has become unjustifiably expensive, inaccessible, and unaccountable.”

To his credit, Brooks recognizes that the “crisis” of higher education is situated in the crisis of American society:

“If crisis there is, it surely has something to do with the larger crisis in American society: the increasing gap between haves and have-nots, the retreat from any commitment to economic fairness, the sense that the system is rigged to benefit a tarnished elite that no longer justifies its existence. The affluence gap between Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, plus a few others, and the rest of the universities has indeed increased, and permits a degree of luxury to both students and faculty in those institutions that are the envy of the rest. (Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley—generally considered the greatest public university in the world—had their telephones removed from their offices last year, in a nicely symbolic gesture of their helplessness under the budget knife.)

For faculty, the treatment of tenure and academic freedom as unwarranted protections afforded few other professions is of specific interest.   Brooks comments are fairly balanced:

“Neither Taylor nor Hacker and Dreifus think tenure is necessary to protect academic freedom: the former sees no threat,…. Do they consider whether the dark days of McCarthyism would have produced even more casualties without it; nor do they anticipate what things could be like in a political culture of Tea Partiers and Palinites. To be sure, tenure can protect the careers of some mediocrities. On the other hand, the selection of faculty by peers empowered by the permanence of their appointments still seems the best way to ensure that they are chosen on the right grounds. And the weightiness of this decision—attaching someone to your institution for an indefinite future—at least means that almost all universities have created reasonably careful and solemn procedures of review.”

In sum, I highly recommend this review for those who would like to catch up on this topic.

Tony

CUNY, Community Colleges and Remedial Students!

Dear Commons Community,

The NY Times has a sobering article on the extent of remediation at the CUNY community colleges.  The thrust of the article is based on the fact that three-quarters of the 17,500 freshmen at the community colleges this year needed remedial instruction in reading, writing or math, and nearly a quarter of the freshmen have required such instruction in all three subjects.   The reasons are familiar but were reinforced last month by startling statistics from NYS education officials.  As commented upon this blog, fewer than half of all New York State students who graduated from high school in 2009 were prepared for college or careers, as measured by state Regents tests in English and math. In New York City, the proportion was 23 percent.

The cost of remediation in the community colleges was about $33 million last year  — twice as much as it was 10 years ago.  The chances of success for these students that is completion of a degree are not very good as Executive Vice Chancellor Lexa Logue indicated:  “There’s no question that the more remediation a student needs, the less likely they are ever to graduate.”

The article goes on to comment on some hope for the future as President Obama pledges to make completion of a two-year degree a national priority, the Gates Foundation is earmarking $110 million in grants for this purpose, and the NYC Education Department is implementing better student tracking programs in high school and post high school.

Tony

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain!

Dear Commons Community,

Peter Shea, a colleague of mine at SUNY Albany, recommended the above book to me written by MaryAnne Wolf, a professor of Child Development at Tufts University.  For linguists and reading specialists, I’ll presume that a lot of the material in this book is known.  However, for those of us in other fields, I found it is quite enlightening and helpful in terms of understanding a lot of the articles, books, and columns that we have seen in the last few years regarding Internet use among young people and reading ability/habits.

The first few chapters cover the origins of alphabets, reading and writing.  This was interesting stuff and new to me.  The middle chapters slow down a bit as the author gets into how we learn to read – kind of step by step – letter by letter – word by word – etc.    She makes a good comment that we give  children 2000 days (between 5-6 years) to learn the alphabet and begin reading.  She also makes the point that this is arbitrary and different individuals are ready to read at different ages.

The last chapter is where the author gives her opinion/expertise on the effects of rapid Internet use by young people and their ability to read, write, and to think.  On page 226 is her main conclusion:

“I fear that many of our children are in danger of becoming …decoders of information, whose false sense of knowing distracts them from deeper development of their intellectual potential.  It does not need to be so”.

She recommended among other things that:

“We must teach our children to be ‘bitextual’ or ‘multitextual’ ..and be able to read and analyze texts in different ways…”

The emphasis on the above is we need to teach both and not divide into camps for one or the other. It makes sense that we should be teaching for “deep reflective” text  as well as for “quick – get the information” text.

Tony

Wolf, M.  (2007).  Proust and the Squid:  The Story and Science of the Reading Brain!  New York: Harper Perennial