Dear Commons Community,

The following was sent to me by Ivonne Barreras, a doctoral student in the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education at the Graduate Center.
While attention from policymakers, higher education leaders, nonprofit groups, and the business community remains focused on college completion and loan debt, where students start their studies in large part determines the likelihood of completing a degree program and chances of facing long-term financial distress. A new brief, Portraits: Initial College Attendance of Low-Income Young Adults, published by the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), suggests that poverty still matters a great deal in terms of the types of institutions at which young adults are initially enrolling. In particular, they find that low-income students—between ages 18 and 26 and whose total household income is near or below the federal poverty level—are likely to be overrepresented at for-profit institutions and are likely to be underrepresented at public and private nonprofit four-year institutions.

According to the brief, from 2000 to 2008, the percentage of low-income students enrolling at for-profits increased from 13 percent to 19 percent, while the percentage enrolling in public four-year institutions declined from 20 percent to 15 percent. Portraits also includes facts pointing to the significant differences by race and gender as low-income females on the whole were twice as likely as low-income males to start at a for-profit institution. For example, data from the brief show that more Black and Hispanic females from low-income backgrounds started at for-profit institutions than at both public and private four-year institutions combined.

Other findings include:

* There are 5.5 million more first-year students enrolled in postsecondary education than at the start of the 21st century; two out of every five of whom come from a low-income household
* Nineteen percent of low-income young adults were enrolled at for-profit institutions in 2008, versus 5 percent of their more financially prosperous peers
* Low-income female students from every racial/ethnic group are nearly three times as likely to attend for-profits as their higher-income female counterparts

A key question is what are the public four-year colleges and universities doing or not doing that is resulting in so many minority students opting to go to for-profit institutions.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Tom Friedman in his NY Times column today describes the work of Michael. J. Sandel, a political philosophy professor at Harvard who was just named “Most Influential Foreign Figure of the Year” in China’s Newsweek.  Sandel’s lectures are available on the Internet and have become incredibly popular in Asia especially China and Japan.

What makes Sandel so compelling is his teaching style and the way he uses real-life examples to illustrate the philosophies of the likes of Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill.

“Sandel will start by tossing out a question, like, “Is it fair that David Letterman makes 700 times more than a schoolteacher?” or “Are we morally responsible for righting the wrongs of our grandparents’ generation?”  Students offer competing answers, challenge one another across the hall, debate with the philosophers — and learn the art of reasoned moral argument along the way.”

Friedman concludes that:

“Sandel’s popularity in Asia reflects the intersection of three trends. One is the growth of online education, where students anywhere now can gain access to the best professors from everywhere. Another is the craving in Asia for a more creative, discussion-based style of teaching in order to produce more creative, innovative students. And the last is the hunger of young people to engage in moral reasoning and debates, rather than having their education confined to the dry technical aspects of economics, business or engineering.”

In my own visits to China, I too saw a desire on the part of college students to engage in discussion and debate about significant issues.  This style of teaching and engagement is not common in college classrooms there.  to the contrary, it is much more of a one-way lecture style of teaching with minimal faculty to student interaction.

Congratulations to Professor Sandel.  It is a  well deserved recognition.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last night was the first of what will be many presidential debates.  I could not bear to watch the various Republican hopefuls blah over what we need to do to move our country forward.   They mostly criticized President Obama without offering solutions.  Unfortunately as I drifted and considered what the Democrats are doing or not doing, I grew concerned.  While I have a lot of confidence in President Obama, I am not hearing anything that will move us out of our economic doldrums.  This morning, David Brooks, provided a good analysis of how I (and I presume many others) feel about the upcoming election.  He proposed that we need a new approach, a new party (not the Tea party) with the following invigoration program.

“The reinvigoration package would have four baskets. There would be an entitlement reform package designed to redistribute money from health care and the elderly toward innovation and the young. Unless we get health care inflation under control by replacing the perverse fee-for-service incentive structure, there will be no money for anything else.

There would be a targeted working-class basket: early childhood education, technical education, community colleges, an infrastructure bank, asset distribution to help people start businesses, a new wave industrial policy if need be — anything that might give the working class a leg up.

There would be a political corruption basket. The Tea Parties are right about the unholy alliance between business and government that is polluting the country. It’s time to drain the swamp by simplifying the tax code and streamlining the regulations businesses use to squash their smaller competitors.

There would also be a pro-business basket: lower corporate rates, a sane visa policy for skilled immigrants, a sane patent and permitting system, more money for research.”

Brooks concluded that he will cover the upcoming presidential election under protest.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

There is a substantive  article in today’s NY Times on what high school seniors should check off for the “race question”  on college admissions forms.   The question takes on interest because of the growing racial diversity of the American population with many individuals considering themselves multiracial with a number of answers applying to their identity.  For instance, the article mentions that:   “This past spring, at least four applicants to Rice University checked the box for nearly every ethnicity and race.”   Admissions counselors at highly selective colleges such as Rice admit that the chances of minority and multi-racial students being admitted are higher than for the total pool of applicants.

The comments of the high schoolers in this article are Illuminating as to how they feel they should answer the race question.  For instance, they indicate that while many of them celebrate and are proud of their multiracial identity, some would consider gaming the admissions process to get into the college of their choice by checking off their minority race only.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Photographs of a recovering Gabriella Giffords were released on Facebook yesterday by her family.   Congresswoman Giffords was a victim of an assassination attempt earlier this year in Tucson, Arizona. See below for a video news story on how her recovery is going.   We sincerely wish her and her family well.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Katherine Stewart has an interesting op-ed article in the NY Times today dealing with the issue of separation of church and state and more specifically on the use of public school facilities for religious purposes.  The article refers to a US Court of Appeals ruling last week that reversed an earlier court ruling in a 2001 decision, Good News Club vs. Milford Central School, in which the United States Supreme Court appeared to suggest that keeping religious groups out of schools after hours amounted to discrimination against their religious views.

Subsequent federal rulings effectively forced the city to open school doors to nearly any religious group that asked for the privilege. On June 2, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the city could restrict religious congregations from conducting worship services in schools. To exclude an activity from a school because it is religious in nature, Judge Pierre N. Leval wrote, is not to discriminate against it on account of its religious viewpoint. Indeed, the school system does not give access to partisan groups, and no one supposes that they are losing their freedom of speech just because they can’t get free space. Using the school system to subsidize houses of worship, on the other hand, risks violating the Constitutional ban on the establishment of religion.

I agree with Ms. Stewart’s conclusion that:

“it’s just that I imagine that that big red door is about education for all, not salvation for a few. Sometimes a building is more than a building.”

I can see this case being appealed to the US Supreme Court.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Daily News reported today that the New York State Education Department is getting ready  to award a $27 million no-bid contract to a company former city Schools Chancellor Joel Klein oversees.

The money – part of the state’s $700 million in Race to the Top funding – will go to Wireless Generation, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, to develop software to track student test scores, among other things.

Klein took a job at News Corp. overseeing its educational technology business after he left the chancellor job in December.

City rules forbid former workers from contacting the agency that employed them for one year, but the rules would not formally bar contact between Klein and the state.

“It raises all kinds of red flags,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York. “It just smacks of an old-boys club, where large amounts of public money are spent based not on ‘is this the best product?’

Wireless Generation helped build a similar system in the city called Achievement Reporting and Innovation Systems, or ARIS, that has been widely criticized in the city.

The contract would expand the ARIS system statewide.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Education Week is reporting on a new analysis of high school completion from the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center (EPE) that finds that the national graduation rate stands at 71.7 percent for the class of 2008, the most recent year for which data are available. The highest level of graduation for the nation’s public high schools since the 1980s, this result also marks a significant turnaround (3 percent increase) following two consecutive years of declines and stagnation.   New York State is on par with the national percentage at 71.8 percent and is ranked 31^st among the states.  In New York City, the graduation  rate was 57.3 percent which is better than a number of other large metropolitan areas including Houston, Baltimore, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia.   The bad news is that 1.2 million students  will drop-out of high school this year,  39, 669 of which will be in New York City.

The Education Week article is available at: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/06/09/34analysis.h30.html

but requires a subscription or registration.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

For decades the influence of socio-economics on academic achievement has been well-documented in the education research literature.  A great debate going back to the Coleman Report of 1966 has evolved over the effects of the home, family, and neighborhood versus those of the school on academic achievement and success.  This issue generally manifests itself as part of the discussion about the inequities of public school financing.  However another aspect of the issue was presented in an article in the NY Times that covered the use of tutors for children to pass SAT and other tests to assure entry to the “best” schools.  The hours and costs for these tutoring services are quite significant.  For example:

“Last year, she [the mother of one high school senior] said, her tutoring bills hit six figures, including year-round SAT preparation from Advantage Testing at $425 per 50 minutes; Spanish and math help from current and former private school teachers at $150 an hour; and sessions  with Mr. Iyer [a top tutor at Ivy Consulting Group] for Riverdale’s equally notorious interdisciplinary course Constructing America, at $375 per 50 minutes.”

No one begrudges people who have resources to use them as best they can for their children but we have set up an academic reward system in this country  based extensively on testing that favors significantly children of means.   The article also makes the point that:

”What is most troubling to those trying to curtail academic tutoring is that instead of remedial help for struggling students, more and more of it seems to be for those trying to get ahead in the intensely competitive college-application race.”  Furthermore the parent at one private school said that: “The policy is that [students] are not supposed to have a tutor,” [but] “The reality is that they all have them.”

Borrowing a phrase from fitness self-help guru Susan Powter, whose infomercials were ubiquitous in the 1990s, we need to find a way “to stop the insanity”.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading The Information by James Gleick., the author of the highly acclaimed Chaos and Genius. I had read several of its reviews and decided to pass on it but my colleague, Joel Spring (Queens College) suggested that I give it a try.  It was a good suggestion.  Gleick covers a lot of ground in establishing the importance of “the information” as a prime mover and universal substance.  Yes he attributes a physicality to “the information”.  For instance,

“all things physical are information theoretic in origin.”

“every burning star, every silent nebula, every particle …is an information processor”

“We are all patrons of the Library of Babel now and we are the librarians too…the library will endure ;  it is the universe”.

He traces the history of “the information” from the Greeks to the present and includes many of the major figures in computer science, physics, communications, and mathematics.  Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Samuel Morse, Charles Babbage, Ada Byron Lovelace and Marshall McLuhan all are part of  the story of “the information”.   One of Gleick’s conclusions is a play on Moore’s Law that with the dawning of computer technology in the 1960s, all information has grown and will continue to grow exponentially.  One of the best lines for me was Gleick’s quote of Stephen Hawking in response to Einstein’s famous “God does not play dice”.  Hawking’s reply “God not only plays dice..He sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen”.

In sum, I found it a most interesting read.  If you are debating whether to plunge into this 500 plus page journey into “the information” here are two reviews by Janet Maslin and Geoffrey Nunberg.

Tony