College Remediation Study

Oh yeah, I'm going there.

"Over one third of college students need to take remedial courses — and sometimes courses so basic that they can’t begin their intended majors without them."

The article could also have been headlined "New Report Shows that Colleges are accepting under-qualified students for monetary reasons despite overwhelming evidence that they aren't ready" or possibly "College Admissions Departments admit to a total lack of Ability to Read an SAT score report."

My weakest students score 60% in all of their math classes, score below 400 on each of the sections of the SAT and do not get a recommendation from me. Somehow, amazingly, they're all accepted to some college. "Glory, sing the Angels!"

"High school teachers and administrators are either unaware of what is expected in college, or unable to align their curricula with college prep because the material on standardized tests does not match material colleges are looking for students to know. Colleges also use a variety of placement tests, which adds to the confusion over what students need to know."

On the contrary, we know exactly what it will take and we'll tell them until they're sick of hearing it. Most of us grade appropriately and will give a failing student the failing grade he is demanding -- which is more than I can say for colleges. Every course I've taken recently has been graded on attendance or other wishy-washy bullshit.

If the colleges would simply refuse to enroll unready students, it might actually give us a little bit more help in motivating the rest of the kids to learn more. As it is, college is a guarantee and in some states, a free one.

Bottom line: I will care about college remedials when these weakest students get REJECTED by colleges. If the Admissions department had done the smallest due diligence, none of this would be a surprise.

Until then, shove your hypocrisy where it belongs.

Have a Nice Day.

Once more into the Ed Reform Breach, Dear Friends

Joanne Jacobs notes that Rhode Island considers tiered diplomas: The best students in Rhode Island’s most rigorous schools may get a Regents diploma showing they’ve met state standards, while most graduates would earn a local diploma, reports the Providence Journal. Tougher graduation requirements linked to the Regents diploma are supposed to go into effect in 2012. But many districts — including the three largest, Cranston, Providence and Warwick — aren’t ready to teach to that level. Students aren’t ready either.

I've thought for years that a single diploma was too broad a brush to paint the picture of all of the graduates. I approved of the NYRegents diploma when it was actually a challenge to get one, when you had to work hard at a more difficult course and pass a more difficult curriculum to get it.

What I foresee happening in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations is a quick fade on the strict adherence to the standards they set up. Just as NY has fiddled with its tests until the NYRegents has little meaning, so will the RIRegents.

Maybe there will be some students who stand out while it lasts. It would certainly alleviate the problems of remedial word requirements in college and would allow employers and college admissions people to have a better feel for the true ability of the applicant.

How do Corporations Choose?

From a A WALL STREET JOURNAL Letter to the Editor
Reader Harvey Karten concludes that the recent Journal article about employers favoring graduates of big state universities over graduates of the Ivies is an indication that there are still things that government can do better than private industry.

I think it just as likely that the corporations are tired of the self-absorbed and self-indulgent TFA wanna-bes, primarily scions of the upper-class, graduates of the Ivies and are instead looking for candidates who had to work for a degree and who might be more likely to succeed at working for a living.

Not Everyone should go to College

And we probably don't need more money dumped into the laps of the drunks and fools. "The best way to assure quality in education is to make them pay for it."

I'm ambivalent. If only there were a way to ensure that the money wasn't being wasted. I know many of my students who skip college should reconsider but have money issues. What I can't predict is whether they'd fall into the immaturity trap.

Technology and the Digital Natives

We hear all the time about our digital natives, their need for 21st century skills and their total immersion in 21st century technology. This morning, the following thought occurred to me:

Our kids don't need any training / help / instruction / encouragement with social networks and tech. They've got that in spades already. What they need is to control their social life and learn the unsocial 21st century skills.

My son was sitting on the coach with his wireless laptop, playing World of Warcraft with Facebook open in another window, his band's Myspace open in another and an IM session running ... then his phone rang. The TV was showing iCarly or Spongebob.

If anything, kids need to be pulled back and calmed down when it comes to social media and web 2.0. They've stayed at the banquet table too long and gorged themselves on every privacy exposure they could find. There are ways to reduce your public exposure, but many settings were deliberately left obfuscated so kids wouldn't understand what they were throwing away. Marketing, of course.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt in Wall Street Journal: "In the future, the passage from teenage life to adulthood will include an automatic name change 'in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.' "

I don't think it needs to be that way and it's not too late. Everyone should simply change their names now on all social media accounts. As I said last month, put up a fake persona. We all need to do that: our social life gets a fake persona ("Harold the Magnificent"), work and serious life gets the true stuff, and never the twain shall meet.

Back in the classroom, what our kids really need for the "real world" and for "work in the 21st century" is to learn and make better use of the non-social tools. You know: spreadsheets, word documents, email, writing, publishing, graphic arts, WolframAlpha and calculators, online references and other tools ... whether Excel, Google Docs, blogs, OpenOffice, forums, wikis, etc.  They need to consider their words, slow down their minds and stop blaring out any random fluttering thought.

We need a catchier word for it. though. What's the opposite of "social media?"

Anti-social ... no.
Non-social ... that doesn't seem right either. It's serious but needs to be shared.
Web 2.x ... not descriptive enough.
unsocial ... oh sure, make a geek joke, why don't you?

Accountability

From the Washington Post,

Teacher accountability schemes let teens off the hook
By Daniel Willingham
Not long ago a student told me a story about taking the SAT. Students were to bring a photo I.D., and the girl in front of her in line had not brought one. When she was told that she couldn’t take the test without the i.d., she was incredulous. She literally did not believe that there would be a consequence for her forgetfulness. She assumed that there would be a Plan B for people like her. When it became clear that plan B was “go home and next time, bring your I.D.,” she was angry and scornful.

I see this attitude not infrequently in freshmen I teach. They are unaccustomed to the idea that they are fully responsible for their actions, at least in the academic arena. In contrast, professors at most colleges very much think of students as 100% responsible for their own learning. Professors may not notice or care whether students come to class, study, or learn. Most professors figure that their job is to teach well. Whether the student learns or not is up to him or her.

This attitude may seem uncaring, but I believe it’s no different than the attitude 18-year olds would find in the military or in the workplace.

Setting aside the issue of whether college freshmen should carry 100% responsibility for their learning, consider this question. Given that that is the state of the world, what happens during K-12 education to prepare students for this responsibility? It seems to me that almost nothing is done. But shouldn’t students become increasingly aware of this responsibility as they get older?

I can see telling a first grade teacher: “You can’t expect the kids to come to you. You’ve got to reach them.” But if we say the same thing to a high school teacher, we’re failing to teach students something important.

Yet all of the formulations of teacher accountability that use student performance data fail to take this factor into account. Student learning is used to evaluate high school teachers and lower elementary teachers in the same way. But if you believe that students should become more responsible for their learning as they age, shouldn’t teachers become less responsible?

I’m not discussing parental responsibilities here, but that doesn’t mean I think that they should be off the hook.

A quality we prize in adults is the ability to learn something from everyone. Being able to learn from different teachers is an important life skill, one that we should build into our students’ education. To my knowledge, it’s not done.

Naturally, the danger is that teachers will be only too glad for students to assume responsibility for their learning. My suggestion is predicated on a different model of teacher accountability, one in which teachers are accountable for teaching well. Students are responsible to do their part

Damn, I love the way this man thinks.

College ROI from InSty

Glenn Reynolds says the Higher Ed Bubble is about to Burst. Nah. It already burst. Some stupid people didn't get the message yet, but that's just the left end of the curve.

Not everyone should go to college. Some people aren't ready, others aren't appropriately placed there. Partying for four years is cheaper if you leave out the tuition, room and board and simply get an apartment and leave the door unlocked. Better to join the military and get the stupid out. You'll be prepared after your six.

Half of the college degrees are crap. If your degree is in Religious and Women's Studies, I don't know why you're going to college instead of starting a church in Provincetown.

If you need to borrow $100,000 to get it, then you'd better get a degree that will help you pay that off, eh? $40,000 per year or more should get you into an MBA or engineering or something lucrative. Unless you're rich to start with?

Bubble bursting? Only for those who dreamed of pink ponies, rainbow unicorns and cotton candy worlds.

Incentives ... part two - Free applications

For some reason, the Geniuses of Indiana thought free college applications was going to work.

A laudable goal: get more kids to apply for college. Misguided idea: make it free for one week only. So what happened? TONS of applications. Some were legitimate, many were incomplete (it's free so who cares?), many were done as a class project with no intention of actually applying (it's free so let's get some practice at the expense of the college office).

"but some colleges say last year's initiative was misguided and caused problems." Only some?

"Any time you start up a new program, you are going to have unintended consequences," said Elizabeth Crouch, spokeswoman for Learn More Indiana, an Indiana Higher Education Commission partner. "We have had many, many conversations with the schools, and we've gotten good input about how to move forward."

By not ever doing this again? Don't you love how the little weasel pushed the idea that this was growing pains, not merely stupid? Purdue gets 10,000 admissions @$50 from Indiana kids alone. That $50 pays for the attention, visits, tours, replies, brochures, advertising, etc. Why on earth would the college voluntarily give that up and increase their workload by four or fives times with a bunch of crap applications? This is a lot like the problem with teacher applications through SchoolSpring.com -- you get hundreds of chaff for a few kernels of wheat -- it's free and easy so why not click the button?

But the high school liked it so it was good, right? It "opened doors for students." "I saw students who would have never dreamed of applying to college fill out applications, and follow up," he said.

"Total self-serving, misguided BS," I said.

Re-posted here in case the link is archived.

Indiana higher ed officials: Free college application week misguided
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) — Education officials thought more Indiana high school students would apply for college if applications fees were waived for one week each year, but some colleges say last year's initiative was misguided and caused problems.

Enrollment officials across the state said their staffs wasted hundreds of hours sorting through applications, many of them incomplete, and trying to follow up with students who had no intention of attending college, The Herald-Times of Bloomington reported Saturday.

Indiana University officials said the free week cost the school more than $300,000.

"Any time you start up a new program, you are going to have unintended consequences," said Elizabeth Crouch, spokeswoman for Learn More Indiana, an Indiana Higher Education Commission partner. "We have had many, many conversations with the schools, and we've gotten good input about how to move forward."

The Indiana Higher Education Commission launched its "College Go!" initiative late last summer to get more Indiana high school seniors applying to Indiana colleges and universities. During one week in October, students could apply to state colleges and universities for free. Many schools charge around $50 to apply.

Record numbers of students applied to Indiana colleges, Crouch said.

University officials don't dispute the numbers or object to the program's goals.

"It was well-intentioned but misguided," said Roger Thompson, who was Indiana University's vice provost for enrollment management before resigning this month to take a similar position at the University of Oregon.

Many applications were never completed, and others were from students who clearly would not be admissible to IU, Thompson said. The school will not waive application fees this year.

"Unfortunately, College Go! week quickly became synonymous with free applications," said Pamela Horne, dean of admissions at Purdue University. "We normally receive around 10,000 applications from Indiana students each year at $50 an application. If everyone just waits until College Go! week to apply — you do the math."

Filling out a college application — typically online — starts the application process and creates a virtual file for a high school student. It also launches various contact and follow-up procedures at most schools, but a full application is not complete until high school transcripts and SAT or ACT scores are added.

Students at many Indiana high schools were simply instructed to fill out college admission applications as a class project. So it was difficult for universities to predict who was serious about attending college.

"It's very difficult to judge a student's interest in Indiana if they were in a high school class that said 'apply to five schools by the end of the class period,'" Thompson said.

But college admissions coordinator Terry Henry at Ben Davis High School in Indianapolis said College Go! week opened doors for students.

"From where I sit, I saw students who would have never dreamed of applying to college fill out applications, and follow up," he said.

Crouch acknowledged the complaints about the program and said changes will be made. College Go! week will be earlier this year, from Sept. 20-24, and officials will not be pressuring colleges to waive application fees as hard as they did last year.

IU spokesman Larry MacIntyre said the school can't afford another free application week.

"When you have one group of students who applied early and paid the fee, and then they turn around and see another group of students get to apply for free, they say, 'Hey, that isn't fair.' And it isn't," he said. "It put us in a tough situation."

___

Information from: The Herald Times, http://www.hoosiertimes.com

Cheating starts with The Administration

From the NYTimes

One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average. But it’s not because they are all working harder.
The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.

No. The goal is to make the school look more attractive. The student benefit is secondary.

Colleges have been playing this game for years: paying students to retake the SAT to raise the USNews rankings, gaming the enrollments to increase "diversity", fiddling with grading to improve student "satisfaction", and now they're out and out lying about GPA calculated from the inflated grades of watered down courses presented by professors who have lessened their requirements and overlooked more.

Changed to pass/fail so the pressure is reduced but "This new grading system also makes it harder for employers to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, which means more students can get a shot at a competitive interview." Total bullshit.

and we wonder why the students feel entitled?

Placing the Blame - Student Debt.

The NYTimes has a long article detailing the money troubles of a recent grad with thousands in debt. Showing pictures of her in her fashionable clothes and a ten-speed bike, the reporter bemoans the seemingly vast numbers of students who, through no fault of their own, racked up enormous debt. The colleges and universities should do something, he rants. Deputize MBA students (?). The parents - are they at fault? Sallie Mae? CitiBank?  Yeah, CitiBank.

Puhlease. Just because she's pretty doesn't mean she's right. Just because CitiBank sucks doesn't mean they're wrong. Let's examine a few things.

"The balance on Cortney Munna’s loans is about $97,000, including all of her federal loans and her private debt from Sallie Mae and Citibank. What are her options for digging out?"

Holy crap. She must have really needed that degree if she was willing to incur that much debt. The prospects must have been good before the recession hit, wouldn't you think? I'll bet this was an MBA or engineering degree? She's got savant talent and is about to blow your doors off? Well, no.

"... since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies."

Right there, you can tell this isn't going to end well. This is obviously not a financial wizard. She majored in touchy-feely on someone else's nickel. She went to NYU instead of CC or any of the SUNY campuses. It isn't all bad, though. She just got a raise. Now she makes almost as much as I do.

"She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. After taxes, she takes home about $2,300 a month. Rent runs $750, and the full monthly payments on her student loans would be about $700 if they weren’t being deferred, which would not leave a lot left over."

Not a lot left? That would be $850 per month left over, maybe $30 per day. She is just out of college. She can brown-bag lunches like the rest of us. Share expenses. Skip the "going out" stuff. Bike to work instead of bus or car. Share the apartment. Get a second job, if she needs the money so badly. Get another, more useful college degree but not if it is solely to avoid paying your debt. When you are desperate, try 80-hour work weeks - it beats eight hours of tv and partying every night.

Another womyn's studies disaster. Cry me a river.

The article is copied below.

Placing the Blame as Students Are Buried in Debt

By RON LIEBER

Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it.

Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she’s been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.

This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.

Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday — just like the mortgage lenders who didn’t ask borrowers to verify their incomes.

Ms. Munna does not want to walk away from her loans in the same way many mortgage holders are. It would be difficult in any event because federal bankruptcy law makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loan debts. But unless she manages to improve her income quickly, she doesn’t have a lot of good options for digging out.

It is utterly depressing that there are so many people like her facing decades of payments, limited capacity to buy a home and a debt burden that can repel potential life partners. For starters, it’s a shared failure of parenting and loan underwriting.

But perhaps the biggest share lies with colleges and universities because they have the most knowledge of the financial aid process. And I would argue that they had an obligation to counsel students like Ms. Munna, who got in too far over their heads.

How many people are like her? According to the College Board’s Trends in Student Aid study, 10 percent of people who graduated in 2007-8 with student loans had borrowed $40,000 or more. The median debt for bachelor’s degree recipients who borrowed while attending private, nonprofit colleges was $22,380.
The Project on Student Debt, a research and advocacy organization in Oakland, Calif., used federal data to estimate that 206,000 people graduated from college (including many from for-profit universities) with more than $40,000 in student loan debt in that same period. That’s a ninefold increase over the number of people in 1996, using 2008 dollars.

The Family

No one forces borrowers to take out these loans, and Ms. Munna and her mother, Cathryn, have spent the years since her graduation trying to understand where they went wrong. Ms. Munna’s father died when she was 13, after a series of illnesses.

She started college at age 17 and borrowed as much money as she could under the federal loan program. To make up the difference between her grants and work study money and the total cost of attending, her mother co-signed two private loans with Sallie Mae totaling about $20,000.

When they applied for a third loan, however, Sallie Mae rejected the application, citing Cathryn’s credit history. She had returned to college herself to finish her bachelor’s degree and was also borrowing money. N.Y.U. suggested a federal Plus loan for parents, but that would have required immediate payments, something the mother couldn’t afford. So before Cortney’s junior year, N.Y.U. recommended that she apply for a private student loan on her own with Citibank.

Over the course of the next two years, starting when she was still a teenager, she borrowed about $40,000 from Citibank without thinking much about how she would pay it back. How could her mother have let her run up that debt, and why didn’t she try to make her daughter transfer to, say, the best school in the much cheaper state university system in New York? “All I could see was college, and a good college and how proud I was of her,” Cathryn said. “All we needed to do was get this education and get the good job. This is the thing that eats away at me, the naïveté on my part.”

But Cortney resists the idea that this is a tale of bad parenting. “To me, it would be an uncharitable reading,” she said. “My mother has tried her best, and I don’t blame her for anything in this.”

The Lender

Sallie Mae gets a pass here, in my view. A responsible grownup co-signed for its loans to the Munnas, and the company eventually cut them off.

But what was Citi thinking, handing over $40,000 to an undergraduate who had already amassed debt well into the five figures? This was, in effect, a “no doc” or at least a “low doc” subprime mortgage loan.

A Citi spokesman declined to comment, even though Ms. Munna was willing to sign a waiver giving Citi permission to talk about her loans. Perhaps the bank worried that once it approved one loan, cutting her off would have led her to drop out or transfer and have trouble paying back the loan.

Today, someone like Ms. Munna might not qualify for the $40,000 she borrowed. But as the economy rebounds, there is little doubt that plenty of lenders will step forward to roll the dice on desperate students, especially because the students generally can’t get rid of the debt in bankruptcy court.

The University

The financial aid office often has the best picture of what students like Ms. Munna are up against, because they see their families’ financial situation splayed out on the federal financial aid form. So why didn’t N.Y.U. tell Ms. Munna that she simply did not belong there once she’d passed, say, $60,000 in total debt?

“Had somebody called me and said, ‘Do you have a clue where this is all headed?’, it would have been a slap in the face, but a slap in the face that I needed,” said Cathryn Munna. “When financial aid told her that they could get her $2,000 more in loans, they should have been saying ‘You are in deep doo-doo, little girl.’”

That’s not a role that the university wants to take on, though. “I think that would be completely inappropriate,” said Randall Deike, the vice president of enrollment management for N.Y.U., who oversees admissions and financial aid. “Some families will do whatever it takes for their son or daughter to be not just at N.Y.U., but any first-choice college. I’m not sure that’s always the best decision, but it’s one that they really have to make themselves.”

The complications here go well beyond the propriety of suggesting that a student enroll elsewhere. Colleges don’t always know how much debt its students are taking on, which makes it hard to offer good counsel. (N.Y.U. does appear to have known about all of Ms. Munna’s loans, though.)

Then there’s a branding problem. Urging students to attend a cheaper college or leave altogether suggests a lack of confidence about the earning potential of alumni. Nobody wants to admit that. And once a university starts encouraging middle-class students to go elsewhere, it must fill its classes with more children of the wealthy and a much smaller number of low-income students to whom it can afford to offer enormous scholarships. That’s hardly an ideal outcome either.

Finally, universities exist to enroll students, not turn them away. “Aid administrators want to keep their jobs,” said Joan H. Crissman, interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “If the administration finds out that you’re encouraging students to go to a cheaper school just because you don’t think they can handle the debt load, I don’t think that’s going to mesh very well.”

That doesn’t change the fact, however, that the financial aid office is still in the best position to see trouble coming and do something to stop it. University officials should take on this obligation, even if they aren’t willing to advise students to attend another college.

Instead, they might deputize a gang of M.B.A. candidates or alumni in the financial services industry to offer free financial planning to admitted students and their families. Mr. Deike also noted that the bigger problem here is one of financial literacy. Fine. He and N.Y.U. are in a great position to solve for that by making every financial aid recipient take a financial planning class. The students could even use their families as the case study.

The Options

The balance on Cortney Munna’s loans is about $97,000, including all of her federal loans and her private debt from Sallie Mae and Citibank. What are her options for digging out?

Her mother can’t help without selling her bed and breakfast, and then she’d have no home. She could take her daughter in, but there aren’t good ways for her to earn a living in Alexandria Bay, in upstate New York.

Cortney could move someplace cheaper than her current home city of San Francisco, but she worries about her job prospects, even with her N.Y.U. diploma.
She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It’s the highest salary she’s earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies. After taxes, she takes home about $2,300 a month. Rent runs $750, and the full monthly payments on her student loans would be about $700 if they weren’t being deferred, which would not leave a lot left over.

She may finally be earning enough to barely scrape by while still making the payments for the first time since she graduated, at least until interest rates rise and the payments on her loans with variable rates spiral up. And while her job requires her to work nights and weekends sometimes, she probably should find a flexible second job to try to bring in a few extra hundred dollars a month.

Ms. Munna understands this tough love, buck up, buckle-down advice. But she also badly wants to call a do-over on the last decade. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back,” she said. “It feels wrong to me.”

College Degree isn't working out for everyone.

via Joanne Jacobs: The Class of 2010 borrowed lots of money to attend expensive universities and graduate with skills the labor market doesn’t want, writes Joe Queenan in the Wall Street Journal.

SO?

The whole "college degree gets you a million more over your lifetime" thing was bull all along. It was based on a selected sample comparing apples and oranges.


Here's a bit o' truth for all you students out there.

• All college degrees are NOT created equal. Sorry.
• "Womyn's Studies" and "Black Studies" and "I don't do math so I'm going to be an elementary ed teacher." Don't expect to paid like a rockstar if you can't play a lick.
• This is what happens when you slack your way through classes and start your drinking on Thursday (We don't want Friday classes).  Too much selfish and childish behavior - fewer hours spent doing homework and more spent on your little iPhone and on those video games and TV. Most college students are lazy slackers more interested in beer than work.
• This is the result of searching for the professor who gives out easy As or who rewards the girls with the biggest chest, instead of those who learned something. Choosing a school based on the nearby beach or the quality of the babes doesn't translate to learning anything, you know.

Maybe you SHOULD have been a plumber. Tech school WAS an option, you know. So is the military, though their standards may be a little too high for someone of your obvious talent and sensibilities.

If you're stupid enough to take lame and useless courses and expect a rapid payoff once out of college, I frankly don't care if you have that millstone around your neck. (I'd have said 'albatross' but too few students would get the reference - lack of employment is a punishment for hubris- driven college course selection).

I'm not sorry for having this opinion, kids. You set up your education - this was not a snap judgment. You were not forced into doing this. You demanded your parents hard-earned money for some of this education cost and you took out the loans for the rest. You slept through class or skipped it to go to Spring Break. What did you expect?

You get what you pay for, or in this case what you worked for (or didn't).

If you did take rigorous courses and worked hard, got a good degree and still got laid off, then I do sympathize and wish you better luck. My guess is that you'll be able to get a good job much faster than that other idiot. You'll also be able to work up the ladder faster, too.

The slacker in college is still a slacker in life. He's screwed either way. Don't be that guy.

This is how testing should be used.

From Joanne Jacobs' Community College blog is this note about California's Early Assessment Program, meant to ascertain whether students are ready for college. Instead of waiting until after admission, they've decided to do it early, in the 11th grade. (DUH!) This allows students to pick up the pace in high school while there's still time to get these skills.
Most juniors who take the optional exam are told they’re not ready for college math and English, giving them an incentive to use senior year to boost their skills.

Forget NECAP, indirectly measuring teachers and punishing schools. This is testing that is useful and appropriate.

All agree on the value of eap (at Educated Guess Blog)
Here are some numbers:
"In 2009, 79 percent of juniors took the English exam, but only 16 percent of them were deemed ready. Last year, 36 percent of juniors took the math EAP. Of those who took the Algebra II test, only a quarter were deemed college-ready (20 percent conditionally ready, 5 percent fully ready; of those who took Summative Math, with of bits of Algebra 1, Geometry and Algebra II, the results were better: 88 percent were ready (67 conditionally and 21 percent fully). The combined result for students who took either test: 57 percent (34 percent conditionally ready, 13 percent fully ready)."

Are you on track for college? (at CCBlog)
California’s community colleges want 11th graders to take the Early Assessment Program – EAP–  exam developed by the California State University system. Most juniors who take the optional exam are told they’re not ready for college math and English, giving them an incentive to use senior year to boost their skills. Until now, the state’s 112 community colleges have given their own exams to decide who needs remedial coursework, writes John Fensterwald on Educated Guess. Now 10 community colleges have agreed to use the EAP and 15 more are considering it. It’s a lot cheaper to catch up on academic skills in high school than to wait till college. In fact, higher education leaders want to get students on the college track in eighth and ninth grade.

Those pesky nongraduating basketball players

I'm sure you've all read that Arne Duncan wants to prevent schools from joining the NCAA Basketball tournament if they don't graduate enough of their players.

I had a long rant thing going about data selection and narrow-minded politicians, coupled with a healthy dose of "Why hold black players to different standards than black non-players" and "What would you do about the players who don't want to graduate from college. What if they really want to be in the NBA but the NBA won't allow them to join, which has to be discrimination of some kind because white and Asian tennis players and golfers join their professional leagues at 16 and no one says a word."

But I decided that I'd just show these two graphs and ask Arne to explain the obvious problems:

Statewide College Graduation Rates from IPEDS Graduation Rate Survey

Humm, those seem to be aligning with red-state, blue-state demographics, too. Is that the real goal here? Or is Arne just a DUKE / Vermont fan like me? He wants to see all their competition eliminated by fiat instead of by a last-second three? You think Murray State, Northern Iowa and St. Mary's wanted anything less than the best competition, Arne? Get out of the way, Dude. Your mouth and that hole-in-the ground are getting confused again.

Yes, thank you, my bracket is getting CREAMED!
ESPN: 340 points * PCT(%)42.0% * RNK 2,773,415
AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!

Monday Morning Update:
ESPN: 380 points * PCT(%)55.4% * RNK 2,132,140

Books, Part Deux

Yesterday, I mentioned the books that I have, Part One. Those were the easy-to-read books. I got class sets of those.

The books below are harder to read, with a more limited audience so I only got 3 or 6 of each of them. They are the books a serious math student should have read, so I encourage them to try.

The "Biographies"
These biographies are written for the serious and capable 12th grade student or college student. The writing is very clear and the topic is fascinating for me. My students, not so much. An Imaginary Tale; The Story of i. A funny thing about this one was when I tried to type up the order to present it to the decider-person -- I couldn't type "i" without Word getting all angry at me.
e: The Story of a Number. Maior is a good writer, but not for the faint of brain. Also, try Zero; A Biography of a Dangerous Idea and The The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the World's Most Astonishing Number .

Of course, there's John Allen Poulos:
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, as well as Mathematician Plays the Stockmarket and the inservice classics: Innumeracy and Beyond Innumeracy. He has some others. Try them if these do good things for you.

Damn Near Impossible for High School Students. (If that's not a challenge, I don't know what is ...)
A Brief History of Time by Hawking. You gotta throw down the gauntlet.

Books on the Shelf.

What's in my classroom? Well, I like books and there was money in the budget, so ... someone had to do it. I ordered with this philosophy: if the book was an easy read, I tried to get a class set which could be lent around the department. If not, I got maybe 3 or 6 which I could lend to individual students.

Here are a couple of the easy reads:

Short Circuits.
One-Minute Mysteries: These are really easy but a good way to while away a few minutes of TA or homeroom. They are one- or two-paragraph mini-mysteries in which the criminal makes one mistake or one misstatement that shows his guilt. "How could he have known the victim was killed with a potato peeler if he wasn't there?" A similar book is Two Minute Mysteries, which is more of those "outside the box thinking" or "lateral thinking" puzzles. These can take a while because the kids have to come up with reasons that aren't readily seen or intuited. Some reasons fall into the category of "WTF? How are we supposed to know that?"

Statistics:
Huff's How to Lie with Statistics is a classic. I use at least some of the ideas in every class from consumer math through Pre-calculus. I also make the speech before the students start their science fair projects. See also "How to Lie with Maps."

From the guys who brought you Klutz's Guide to Juggling comes Cartoon Guide to Statistics. It's great. In fact, when I unpacked the books, the other math teacher instantly borrowed it. Gotta be a good sign! Witty and fun, it's still got the STUFF. The cartoons are quite descriptive and the math is all there, even if the 'toon of Galileo is goofy.

If you haven't read it ... Freakonomics (and the sequel, Super Freakonomics) is a really good collection of statistical stories and case studies. Leavitt is a good writer and he analyses his work in engaging and easy-to-read chapters. "Why Do Drug Dealers Live with Their Mothers?" and "Why is the KuKluxKlan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?" You'll want an entire Saturday for it.

Theory:
The Number Devil is a good book for starting kids reading about math topics without slapping them silly. Easy to read but not pandering either. Probably the best explanation for the Fibonacci sequence I've seen.

Trivia:
Loosely organized book of trivia and generally "neat stuff" is Brain Fuel. Engaging reads of one or two pages each that aren't particularly mathematical but I was able to buy them, so there! Kind of "Ripley Believe it or Not".

Geometry:
If it's a math class, it has to have Flatland & Sphereland in it. Misogynistic? Yes. Satire? Yes. Still, it's an exploration of geometry you shouldn't be without. Available online for free (long out of copyright), but you'll want tangible books. Fortunately, they're cheap.

SAT Prep
For my SAT Review class, I was able to score some $3 versions of Prince by Machiavelli and Sun Tzu's Art of War. These are used as essay topics. I'll take a paragraph almost at random (they're that good for this kind of thing) and make a question about it. Instant Essay topics.

For the same course, I got - and this is no shit - a copy of Specerian Penmanship. The students are fascinated by my ability to write cursive. Probably 50% can write poorly in cursive, the other half not at all. I, of course, had Mrs. R. to teach me this some 50ish years ago. So I lend out the workbooks with the stern instruction to use a piece of paper placed over top. SO far, no writing in the books. A couple girls have really worked on it. So funny. One texted this fact to her friend - proud she was teaching herself to write cursive. The irony escaped her.

Drafting is important.
How to Read/make Mechanical Drawings and Popular Science's The Art of Mechanical Drawing are good source books for orthographic projections and for general work. I feel it very important that students learn the basics of drafting. The art department is getting swamped and stamped and cut these days and the technical centers are becoming more exclusively for "tech kids" - where's the generally good student to learn this stuff? ME!

I can't say anything yet about 100 essential things because it's backordered.

That's a part. I'll talk about some of the rest tomorrow: the tough reads, the ones that I bought only 3 or 6 copies of.

caio for now.

Football for College Credit.

Everyone seems to be all up in arms about this but I don't agree. I think the football players should be able to legitimately get a credit in football.

One credit. Two. It doesn't really matter.

I got a credits for athletics when I was in college - kayak was 1 and archery was another. We had to have two PE credits. You showed up. You learned a few terms, shot a few flights, took a silly multiple choice exam. It was a nice break from the 18-21 mechanical engineering credits per semester (on top of the ROTC and the stuff for commissioned officers).

What's the big deal? I like it that the rest of the school can have its courses without the lunkheads slowing everything down. They would never have made it to college other than for football, so it's not like they're being deprived of anything. Any players who do have brains will get their education regardless of what the lunkheads do.

With all the people majoring in FillinTheBlank Studies or some other touchy-feely joke, I can't think that 100 football players is going to skew the median all that much.

Math in the Crosshairs again, this time Maryland

"... many graduates do not have a grasp of the basics."
"... schools have deemphasized drilling students."
"... taught too early to rely on calculators."

A calculator is a tool. It should be used as a tool. As soon as it replaces thought, it should itself be replaced.

I have decided to make a new slogan, signifying my reluctance to rely on the thrilling new technology of calculators because of the very real effects on the kids' development.

"Thrill and Kill."

"... ninety-eight percent had to pay for remedial classes." Okay, it's a community college and you expect that many of the attendees would be looking to improve their math skills. But 98% ??

"Across the nation, slightly more than one-third enroll in remedial classes." That's bad, people.

The report gets specific but, in my view, misses the mark. " ... particularly critical of the Algebra I standards, saying that they are watered down because educators must teach material for the High School Assessments, which includes data analysis. It is not what any mathematician would consider an algebra course."

No, I think the algebra I course is watered down because, (A) it is taught to eighth graders and they had to water it down so they could pass more easily and (B) mainstreaming and the refusal to place students in an appropriate class means that every room has kids who slow down the group. This insistence on placing kids in a course based on emotion, faulty pedagogy, self-delusion and parental desire instead of mathematical ability will ruin your classrooms every time.

Anyway, the article that started this train of thought appears below the fold.

A failing grade for Md. math
What is taught in high schools seen as insufficient for college
By Liz Bowie | Baltimore (MD) Sun
July 12, 2009

Maryland's public schools are teaching mathematics in such a way that many graduates cannot be placed in entry-level college math classes because they do not have a grasp of the basics, according to education experts and professors.

College math professors say there is a gap between what is taught in the state's high schools and what is needed in college. Many schools have de-emphasized drilling students in basic math, such as multiplication and division, they say.

"We have hordes of students who come in and have forgotten their basic arithmetic," said Donna McKusick, dean for developmental education at the Community College of Baltimore County. College professors say students are taught too early to rely on calculators. "You say, 'What is seven times seven?' and they don't know," McKusick said.

Ninety-eight percent of Baltimore students signing up for classes at Baltimore City Community College had to pay for remedial classes to learn the material that should have been covered in high school. Across Maryland, 49 percent of the state's high school graduates take remedial classes in college before they can take classes for credit.

And the problem has been getting worse. The need for remedial math classes among Maryland high school graduates who had taken a college preparatory curriculum and went on to one of the state's two- or four-year colleges rose from 23 percent in 1997 to 32 percent in 2007, according to an Abell Foundation report released this spring.

While the problem is worse at community colleges, 15 percent of the freshmen at the University of Maryland, College Park must take a remedial math class before being able to move into college-level classes, said Denny Gullick, a math professor there. Some of those students come from out of state.

For Gabrielle Martino, holder of a doctorate in math from the Johns Hopkins University and a co-author of the Abell Foundation report, the bottom line is that students are being harmed because they have to pay for the remedial classes. When they get to college, "they are uniformly shocked that they were put into remedial math," she said.

The report recommends that the Maryland State Department of Education revamp its math standards and curriculum. The standards and curriculum determine what is tested on the Maryland School Assessments and, therefore, the material teachers are told to cover in their classes. And each year, the number of students passing the math MSAs has gone up, even as graduates are increasingly in need of remedial classes.

State education officials do not believe that major changes to the standards are needed.

"Obviously, we want our students to be successful when they go to college, but we also know that a number of the students who go to university haven't taken the math preparation that would enable them to be prepared," said Dixie Stack, director of curriculum at the state education department.

The call for change comes at a crucial time. The state is reviewing its five-year-old standards, and the National Governors Association is expected to release its common core standards in a few months. Maryland is one of 46 states that have agreed to support the development of those standards, essentially setting a national curriculum and testing in the core subjects of reading and math.

The question of how math is taught and what should be emphasized has been the subject of a long-running debate across the nation. Some math teachers have advocated giving students a deeper understanding of how math works while de-emphasizing the drill of solving many problems and learning math facts. On the other side, teachers say students need to be well grounded in the basics in order to move on to higher-level math.

State school board member Kate Walsh does not believe the state is alone. "Maryland has as much of a problem on its hands as any other state," she said.

Across the country, slightly more than one-third of college students enroll in remedial courses.

"This is really a national problem. States are working hard to address it, but the fact is that too many students require remediation when they enter college. The problem is more severe in math," said Danette Howard, director of research at the Maryland Higher Education Commission.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has argued that no matter how math is taught, students should be focusing on fewer concepts each year. The group said students have knowledge that is a mile wide and an inch deep, and that school districts should teach fewer concepts each year and in greater depth. Presumably, that would enable students to master each concept and move on so that yearly review would be unnecessary.

Maryland public schools seem to be doing a better job in teaching math to top students, Gullick said. More students have been given the opportunity to take higher-level classes during their elementary, middle and high school years, and they end up not only having completed calculus, but often having taken the rigorous Advanced Placement calculus and scored at the top level on the exam.

"A third of the freshman class has taken AP calculus and placed out of calculus" at College Park, Gullick said, adding that the percentage of these high-level students has been growing.

On the other hand, he said, "we have seen a marked decline" in the skills of the students at College Park who are not considered in the "top caliber."

"We have an enormous number of students who have no arithmetic skills. This is a big issue," he said.

The Abell report is particularly critical of the Algebra I standards, saying that they are watered down because educators must teach material for the High School Assessments, which includes data analysis.

"It is not what any mathematician would consider an algebra course," said Stephen Wilson, a math professor at Hopkins and a co-author of the Abell report. "It is Maryland's image of what math is without consulting a mathematician."

Stack said the Algebra I High School Assessment is not intended to ensure that students are ready for college but to make sure they have the minimum skills needed to get a diploma. The standards that the test is based on are "intended to establish a floor for freshmen in high school, and by itself it does not constitute an Algebra I course," she said.

The fact that the state has a minimum standard does not mean a school system cannot teach at a higher level, she said.

Stack said she does not believe the state should make changes until after the release of the national standards being developed by a grass-roots coalition of 46 states. To do so would be a waste of time and taxpayer dollars, she said, because Maryland probably will adopt those standards.

However, Walsh said Maryland should alter its standards to meet mathematicians' concerns. She said she does not believe in waiting, because the process could take years.

"Maryland is taking a go-slow approach," the state school board member said. "I am afraid the push for national standards, while a good sign, will delay the equally important examination we need to take. ... I would prefer to move aggressively."

Frederick Chapple, an assistant professor of mathematics at Baltimore City Community College, said the city schools require students to take an Algebra II class before they can graduate, a requirement that is more stringent than the state's. But the level of the course, Chapple said, isn't Algebra II.

"There should be more collaboration with colleges to be sure that the Algebra II that is being taught in high school is on the same level as the Algebra II that we are teaching in remedial classes," Chapple said. He said high schools should provide all students with a college preparatory curriculum, so that if they decide in their last year of high school that they want to attend college they will be prepared.

Gullick and other professors say they want to work with public school teachers and administrators to determine what must be done to remedy the problem.

Students are being hurt by the current system, Gullick said, and changes should be made at high school and college levels.