The Myth of the Extraordinary Teacher

From Ellie Herman, at Los Angeles Times:

The kid in the back wants me to define "logic." The girl next to him looks bewildered. The boy in front of me dutifully takes notes even though he has severe auditory processing issues and doesn't understand a word I'm saying. Eight kids forgot their essays, but one has a good excuse because she had another epileptic seizure last night. The shy, quiet girl next to me hasn't done homework for weeks, ever since she was jumped by a knife-wielding gangbanger as she walked to school. The boy next to her is asleep with his head on the desk because he works nights at a factory to support his family. Across the room, a girl weeps quietly for reasons I'll never know. I'm trying to explain to a student what I meant when I wrote "clarify your thinking" on his essay, but he's still confused.

It's 8:15 a.m. and already I'm behind my scheduled lesson. A kid with dyslexia, ADD and anger-management problems walks in late, throws his books on the desk and swears at me when I tell him to take off his hood.

The class, one of five I teach each day, has 31 students, including two with learning disabilities, one who just moved here from Mexico, one with serious behavior problems, 10 who flunked this class last year and are repeating, seven who test below grade level, three who show up halfway through class every day, one who almost never comes. I need to reach all 31 of them, including the brainiac who's so bored she's reading "Lolita" under her desk.

I just can't do it.

Keep reading to get to the myth of extraordinary teachers, although I'll add this part:

I understand that we need to get rid of bad teachers, who will be just as bad in small classes, but we can't demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence.

Actually, I'm not even sold on the idea of "really bad" teachers. Some aren't that great and probably shouldn't be teaching. I can think of a couple of professors at my college who have absolutely no social skills, and hence have a hard time reaching a comfortable or appropriate level of interaction with their students. But I also often hear reports about how such-and-such teacher changed some student's life. It's that level of interaction that gives meaning. The students I'm able to help most are generally those who take the time to break from the routine of just showing up. I'll be there to help students, inside the class and out. I'm especially thankful when students make an effort to attend office hours and share with me their own challenges or difficulties. That's when I can assess what needs to be done, and I can design some kind of extra program of help or attention, from either myself or other resources on campus. But all those stories Ms. Herman shares about her students, well, I have some as well. It's the inside of education that's not always known or understood. A lot of this is economic disadvantage, but a lot is just the way things are, that not every student who comes to us turns out as a Ph.D. candidate to Harvard. You make a difference where you can, helping students to learn and move forward. And hopefully you get a little recognition in return, even if it's just a well-needed thank you for your efforts.

Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action

I've forgotten now, but I'm sure I got a few NEA e-mails on this. Here's the website.

These people are angry and stupid, and dangerous combination. Video c/o Glenn Reynolds:

Lessons in Handling Plagiarism From Professor Panagiotis Ipeirotis

I had a nightmare class at UCSB in 1999, the second lecture class I taught as in independent instructor. It was a Black Politics class. I had a running battle with radical students throughout the quarter. I even had one dude pull me aside to say, "Hey, man, this is how you teach the class." I wasn't down hard enough on the Man, apparently. This dude, and some of his allies, wanted a course in victimology and racial recrimination. And I was doing straight civil rights developments and the political science of voting rights and redistricting. It started to be a nightmare. Students complained to the department that I graded their midterms "too hard." It was a big learning experience. And the final exam was the kicker. I caught a couple of black women cheating. They were passing their exam sheets back and forth with notes they'd written while writing their essays. They had arrows and diagrams tracing arguments. It was involved. When one of them turned in the exam I asked for the question sheet and she wasn't about to give it to me. I was like hello? This is what you do. So she reluctantly gave to me and later I turned the students over to the vice chair of the department. Within a couple of days I was called into the chair's office, Professor Lorraine McDonnell, who no one liked, and who had a reputation, basically, of piggy-backing off her husband, Professor M. Stephen Weatherford, a nice guy and sought-after research "quant" (a numbers and methods guy who sharpened research knives, which is hip in political science, a field that remains envious of the economics discipline for its much more formal and recognized academic rigor). Professor McDonnell threw me under the bus. (I ended up assigning grades to all students and being done with that class, and I moved on after that semester to teach at Fresno State.)

Anyway, check this piece at Inside Higher Ed, "Who Is Punished for Plagiarism?" (via Glenn Reynolds):

Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis has taken down the controversial blog post, but the debate is raging on without the original material.

Ipeirotis, a computer scientist who teaches at New York University's Stern School of Business, wrote a post on his blog last week called "Why I will never pursue cheating again." In it, he told the story of how he found that about 20 percent of a 100-person class had plagiarized -- and described the fallout from his accusations. While Turnitin led to his initial suspicions, and gave clear evidence for some of the students, it only cast doubts on other students. Many of them confessed only when Ipeirotis told the class that if he didn't hear from those who had cheated, he would report the incident immediately -- whereas in the end he included in his report the information that students had admitted what they had done.

So why does Ipeirotis consider the experience a failure? His students became antagonistic, he wrote on the blog post, and gave him lower teaching evaluations than he had ever received before. And those poor teaching evaluations were cited in a review that resulted in the smallest raise he had ever received.

Keep reading.

Ipeirotis' post is taken down temporarily. But Ruan YiFeng's Blog has excerpts. I like this:

“The process of discussing all the detected cases was not only painful, it was extremely time consuming as well.

Students would come to my office and deny everything. Then I would present them the evidence. They would soften but continue to deny it. Only when I was saying “enough, I will just give the case to the honorary council who will decide” most students were admitting wrongdoing. But every case was at least 2 hours of wasted time.

With 22 cases, that was a lot of time devoted to cheating: More than 45 hours in completely unproductive discussions, when the total lecture time for the course was just 32 hours. This is simply too much time.”

Students, in general, are inveterate liars when it comes to grades and classroom performance. I'd need more information, but this sounds like Ipeirotis' crucible from the trenches. You can't be an excellent teacher without failing a few times. And in this case there was something wrong, very wrong, with the course design. Exams and paper assignments have to be designed to prevent cheating. If he's doing research papers, there's got to be a way to create a project that students can't easily off load from the web. I still catch about one student plagiarizing a paper every year in World Politics, and usually a couple in American Government. And technically, you can't just fail them without due process. And to provide due process requires a formal administrative review and possibly hearing, and most professors don't even grasp the legal significance of the process. Since I've been a "traditional" professor on the issues, I had some experience dealing with problems at my college and soon I ended up leading a couple of workshops on academic discipline. It's the same stories over and over again. A lot of things you hear are just like what Professor Ipeirotis recounts. And that's why each professor has to develop an assignment regime that makes cheating hard, but they've also got to be ready to uphold standards. For the most part, my college today backs professors. Maybe students at community college aren't as powerful --- or their parents have less resources --- as students at competitive universities, but it pays to lay the administrative groundwork for upholding policies inside the classroom. Without that backing, teaching, inevitably, will be no fun.

Academia's Crisis of Irrelevance

From Naomi Schaefer Riley, at Wall Street Journal, "As more students question rising college costs, professors defend useless research and their lack of teaching."

Read it at the link. The key is academe's divorce from the real world, and I'd pile on about how this is killing the education of waves of students.

Community College Worries and Challenges

At the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Business Officers. See Chronicle of Higher Education, "Community-College Officials Swap Notes on Common Worries and Challenges."

And at New York Times, "At Two-Year Colleges, Less Scrutiny Equals Less Athletic Equality."

Los Angeles Southwest College has a new athletic field house and football stadium, but almost no female athletes.

Women make up more than two-thirds of students at this community college in the city’s South Central neighborhood, but less than a quarter of its athletes. The college’s decision to suspend the track team this year left women who wanted to play a sport with a single option: basketball.

Henry Washington, the college’s athletic director and head football coach, acknowledges that his program is most likely violating federal law by failing to offer enough roster spots to women. But he said many of the female students are also juggling jobs and child care, and do not have time to play sports. Then there is the question of money. “I just keep my fingers crossed that we can keep what we have,” he said...

The situation at Los Angeles Southwest, without question, more closely represents the norm among community colleges around the country. Even as they play an increasingly vital role in American higher education — enrolling more than eight million students nationwide last fall, a 20 percent jump since the fall of 2007, just before the start of the recession — community colleges are routinely failing to provide enough athletic opportunities to women, as required under Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in education. Many community colleges offer an array of options for men but just a single team for women. And dozens of colleges over the years had no women on their athletic rosters, according to federal education statistics.

No one disputes that community colleges face distinct challenges, with a lack of money paramount. But Pensacola, one of the rare exceptions among community colleges, offers evidence that the demands of the law can be met.

Continue reading. And note the comparison to Pensacola State College in Florida. This is all about state money. Those states, like California, deeply in the hole aren't going to be able to provide the opportunities required by law. The question becomes one of enforcement. Seems like California colleges would welcome the scrutiny if it forced state officials to better fund the institutions.

Save California, Campaign for Children and Families, News Release, July 14, 2011

The press release from Save California, "Pro-Family Response to Jerry Brown's Signing of SB 48":

Sacramento, California -- One of California 's top opponents of placing "LGBT" personages in school textbooks is speaking out on the unfortunate signing of SB 48 by Gov. Jerry Brown today.

"Jerry Brown has trampled the parental rights of the broad majority of California mothers and fathers who don't want their children to be sexually brainwashed," said Randy Thomasson, president of SaveCalifornia.com, which helped lead the opposition to SB 48. "SB 48 has no parental opt-out. The only way parents can opt-out their kids from this immoral indoctrination is to opt them out the entire public school system, which is no longer for morally-sensitive parents and their children." (Source: RescueYourChild.com and SaveCalifornia.com SB 48 veto request letter)

In 2009, a KPIX/SurveyUSA poll found that four out of five Californians did not support giving homosexual activist Harvey Milk a statewide day of significance. "With the signing of SB 48, even more California parent will be shocked to see the glorification of Harvey Milk and other homosexual-bisexual-transsexual role models in school textbooks," Thomasson said. "SB 48 is the eighth school sexual indoctrination law forcing immorality on kids in California K-12 schools. It's time for parents who love their children to match their words with deeds and do what's necessary to get them out of the immoral government schools and into the safe havens of homeschooling and church schools."

*****
"It's ridiculous that Jerry Brown says he's making history 'honest,'" Thomasson added. "The bill he signed prohibits teachers and textbooks from telling children the facts that homosexuality has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS and other STDs, higher cancer rates, and earlier deaths. These important facts about lifestyles children will being forced to admire will be omitted. And Brown calls this 'honest'? This revisionist history will actually make more children believe a lie -- that homosexuality is biological, which it's not, and healthy, which is isn't." (Source: "Not Born This Way")

Brown signed SB 48 despite it being completely unnecessary to deal with school bullies. There are existing laws that already strongly address this issue, such as: AB 1785 (2000) requires public schools to coordinate with local law enforcement to suppress and report both "hate crimes" and "hate-motivated incidents"; AB 394 (2007) requires K-12 schools to "post antidiscrimination and antiharassment policies in all schools and offices, including staff lounges and pupil government offices" and requires the State Department of Education to "display information on curricula" relating to "antidiscrimination and antiharassment" in regards to "sexual orientation" (homosexuality and bisexuality) and "gender" (cross-dressing and sex changes); ACR 82 (2010) permits participating schools - pre-kindergarten through higher education - to become official "Discrimination-Free Zones" that "enact appropriate procedures that meaningfully address acts of discrimination that occur on campus."

"These existing laws, in addition to other campus anti-bias and anti-violence laws, are certainly strong enough to quell physical and verbal bullying, rendering SB 48's broad curriculum indoctrination unnecessary even to satisfy the stated anti-bullying goals of the bill's sponsors," Thomasson said. "SB 48 is a revisionist history, sexual brainwashing bill, not an anti-bullying bill."

Continue reading.

See also, Rescue Your Child, "The Problem Facing California Public School Parents":

What your child is guaranteed in California public schools -- Because of bad laws, lack of pro-family laws, and politically-correct trends, here's what kids are guaranteed to receive in California public schools:

1. Homosexual-bisexual-transsexual indoctrination
2. Pro-abortion indoctrination, "confidential” abortion referrals and off-campus "counseling", without parental consent
3. Condom/birth control pills indoctrination and distribution without parental consent; no teaching children how to truly avoid STDs; "abstinence-only" education prohibited
4. Anti-God, pro-evolution indoctrination
5. Political correctness
6. Dumbed-down academics, less academic success, on average, than private or home school
7. Negative socialization and peer pressure
8. Less safety, on average, than private school
9. Anti-Christian indoctrination and widespread rejection of religious and moral values
10. Anti-parent sentiments

More at that link.

Pat Dollard Slams California Gay History Law

On Twitter:

PREVIOUSLY: "California Textbooks to Include Gay Achievements."

Pat Dollard's page is here.

California Textbooks to Include Gay Achievements

Governor Brown has signed the bill.

At Los Angeles Times, "New state law requires textbooks to include gays' achievements":

Reporting from Sacramento

Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Thursday making California the first state to require that school textbooks and history lessons include the contributions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans.

Brown took the action as lawmakers sent him scores of bills, including one that would allow undocumented immigrants access to privately financed student aid at state universities and colleges.

Before adjourning for a monthlong summer recess, the Legislature also proposed changing the way California holds presidential primary elections and awards its electoral votes.

In accepting a mandate that California students be taught the accomplishments of gays and lesbians, Brown said that "history should be honest." The bill, he said in a statement, "revises existing laws that prohibit discrimination in education and ensures that the important contributions of Americans from all backgrounds and walks of life are included in our history books.''

The measure had sparked hot debate in the Legislature, where Republicans argued that it would force a "gay agenda" on young people against many of their parents' wishes. State Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) said the new law, which he wrote, will reduce the bullying of gay students by showing role models in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens.

"Denying LGBT people their rightful place in history gives our young people an inaccurate and incomplete view of the world around them," said Leno, whose bill, SB 48, also covers the role of the disabled in history.

The governor's action drew criticism from conservative groups.

More at that link above.

And in related news, "Many options for parents who want to homeschool kids."

British Youth Can't Read or Write

At Telegraph UK, "Too many young people are unable to read, write or communicate properly and do not work hard, a business leader claimed, as mass immigration is named by the Government as the biggest threat to challenging the benefits culture." (Via Theo Spark.)

Well, if it's any consolation to the Brits, Americans don't know when we severed ties from the mother country. At Marist Poll, "Independence Day — Seventeen Seventy When?" And, "Don’t Know Much About History?"

Tuition Going Up at California Public Universities

California once promised free public higher education to all who could gainfully benefit from its provision. Now though, the state's Master Plan for Higher Education is shattered.

At Los Angeles Times, "Second round of tuition hikes likely at UC and Cal State systems":

Students at the University of California and Cal State University systems are likely to face a second round of tuition hikes this fall in response to deeper funding cuts in the new state budget, officials and student leaders said Wednesday.

Discussions are underway for tuition increases of at least 10%. That hike would come on top of an 8% increase at UC and a 10% boost at Cal State that already are set to take effect this fall.

An early victim of the state budget cuts is a new medical school at UC Riverside. Campus officials said Wednesday they would delay opening the school by a year, until fall 2013.

Student leaders expressed disappointment about their soaring tuition and said that Sacramento is putting the brunt of the state's budget problems on them. A decade of increases has more than tripled tuition to about $11,000 a year at UC and $4,884 at Cal State, not including room, board and other fees.

"Ultimately, this again represents the ongoing disinvestment in higher education in California," said Christopher Chavez, outgoing president of the Cal State Student Assn. "What it comes down to is that students are expected to pay more and to get less."

Look at me, I'm in tatters!

Budget Cuts Hammer University of California Star Faculty Retention

I thought about this recently, having traveled to UCLA for both the Noam Chomsky and David Horowitz events, not to mention my coverage of Students for Justice in Palestine.

The Westwood campus is awesome. Too much construction, but it's a great feeling being on a research campus again. It feels so promising. And I was a little surprised at the vitality, since there's been so much talk of decline at the UC system. Anyway, certainly things aren't going as well as state leaders would like, and that's keeping in mind that UC is more insulated from budget crises than both Cal State and the community colleges. But this report at Los Angeles Times shows a real drag on maintaining quality and prestige. See: "UC fears talent loss to deeper pockets: The departure of three star scientists from UC San Diego has officials worried about a possible brain drain tied to budget cuts."

Read the whole thing at the link. I found fascinating the salaries of the three UCSD scholars lured away to Rice Univerity:

[Jose] Onuchic, who is co-director of UC San Diego's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, said he was drawn to Rice mainly for the research funds and new building, along with the chance to work with cancer experts in Houston. "The opportunities were spectacular," said Onuchic, whose research focuses on protein movement and chemical reactions in gene networks. His UC salary, including summer grants, is $265,000; he and his colleagues said Rice would give them 40% increases.

The three scientists are expected to take with them much of their National Science Foundation grant, which has paid $6.6 million since 2008 and is expected to provide several million more over the next two years. At Rice, their funding will also include a $10-million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, created with a $3-billion state bond issue approved by voters in 2007.

[Herbert] Levine, 55, who has been at UC San Diego for 25 years and earns $187,000 a year, said Rice's new and larger lab space and extra administrative support was too good to turn down. Another factor is that Rice, which has a fifth of UC San Diego's 27,417 students, is much less bureaucratic, he added.

[Peter] Wolynes, 58, is a 10-year veteran of UC San Diego and earns $330,000 a year. Moving together keeps the team intact — it's a "Three Musketeers situation," he said — and the Texas cancer money will mean less hustling for grants. He still greatly admires UC, he said, but believes its "period of expansion" may be over.

These are accomplished scholars, and well-compensated. And it's no surprise that they'd be able to make much more money elsewhere. There's a market for top academics. And public universities struggle to stay competitive in tough economic times.

Teacher Evaluation System Examines Classroom Performance

I'm all for increasing performance, but most of the time it's not the fault of the teachers if students aren't learning. The culture's totally FUBAR, as I've written here many times. That said, I'm not against the classroom observations, as discussed at the article. It depends though: Who are the evaluators? If it's a bunch of progressive educators marinated in failed methodologies of reform (I don't do "group work", for example), will teachers get a fair shake? A lot of these evaluation systems seem punitive. Still, it's a complicated issue, for while I'd probably stand with the unions against flawed evaluations, I'd oppose them on fiscal reforms and teacher pay and benefits. Anyway, at least the fear factor pushes teachers to excel in the classroom.

At New York Times, "Teacher Grades: Pass or Be Fired":

The evaluation system leans heavily on student test scores to judge about 500 math and reading teachers in grades four to eight. Ratings for the rest of the city’s 3,600 teachers are determined mostly by five classroom observations annually, three by their principal and two by so-called master educators, most recruited from outside Washington.

For classroom observations, nine criteria — “explain content clearly,” “maximize instructional time” and “check for student understanding,” for example — are used to rate the lesson as highly effective, effective, minimally effective or ineffective.

These five observations combine to form 75 percent of these teachers’ overall ratings; the rest is based on achievement data and the teachers’ commitment to their school communities. Ineffective teachers face dismissal. Minimally effective ones get a year to improve.

Ouch! That is harsh!

Colleges Cut Summer

Actually, I never liked summer school, but it plays a vital role for colleges and college students. But this summer sucks.

At LAT, "Amid budget cutbacks, California colleges reduce or eliminate summer school."

And from yesterday's Letters to the Editor:

Gov.'s budget stand

Re "Brown veto dismays Democrats," June 17

I want to publicly thank Gov. Jerry Brown for vetoing the sham budget adopted by the Democratic majority in the state Legislature. I also want to acknowledge the minority party's complicity in the budget stalemate.

California has been living in a financial house of cards for decades. We need to build a new house on a firm and sustainable foundation.

The state's budget crisis can be solved with both spending cuts and revenue increases. The choice is not one or the other. I call on our elected representatives, of every political persuasion, to work toward achieving a sustainable financial future.

Nancy I. Day

Los Angeles

Actually, we don't have a revenue problem, but at least she admits the need for spending cuts. And get union give-backs in there, and that'd be the makings of a deal.

Back to Teaching at California State Universities

From Naomi Schaefer Riley, at Los Angeles Times, "Cal State system: It's time to get back to teaching."

There's no quick quote to capture the essence here. Full-time faculty don't do much teaching, it turns out, or at least not "the bulk" of it. Mostly adjuncts nowadays. It's weird, though, because I had the best professors at Fresno State. I think I had one grad student TA, in math. And the professor referred all questions to him, and while the TA was a good guy, proficient, etc., that's probably not the best example of cutting-edge teaching. The Political Science Department was great though. So much better than the University of California, in terms of access to the professors. I mentioned previously that the more hands on attention professors provide, the more they'll help their students. That's what happening in my classes, and I still can't do enough to overcome the skills deficits kids bring to college. So yeah, focus on teaching at Cal State. (And check that link: Schaefer Riley notes that Cal State's at risk of closing ten campuses and turning away 100,000 students --- seems unreal.)

Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview: David McCullough, 'Don't Know Much About History'

I think the culture's changed so much. I'm not sure the same measures of education should be applied to today's younger generations. Yeah, I wish kids read more, and took interest in engagement. Especially kids of diverse or disadvantaged backgrounds. Overall though, it is indeed blank stares in the classroom when checking for just basic historical knowledge. It can be real drag sometimes.

Check it out, at the link:

Boston

'We're raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate," David McCullough tells me on a recent afternoon in a quiet meeting room at the Boston Public Library. Having lectured at more than 100 colleges and universities over the past 25 years, he says, "I know how much these young people—even at the most esteemed institutions of higher learning—don't know." Slowly, he shakes his head in dismay. "It's shocking."

He's right. This week, the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. And consider: Just 2% of those students understand the significance of Brown v. Board of Education.

Mr. McCullough began worrying about the history gap some 20 years ago, when a college sophomore approached him after an appearance at "a very good university in the Midwest." She thanked him for coming and admitted, "Until I heard your talk this morning, I never realized the original 13 colonies were all on the East Coast." Remembering the incident, Mr. McCullough's snow-white eyebrows curl in pain. "I thought, 'What have we been doing so wrong that this obviously bright young woman could get this far and not know that?'"

Answer: We've been teaching history poorly. And Mr. McCullough wants us to amend our ways ...

RTWT.

'State of Emergency' Rally, Los Angeles, May 13, 2011

I couldn't make it. I covered Noam Chomsky the weekend before, and then David Horowitz a couple of days after --- and we were at finals week, and I was finishing up all of my grading. But I would have loved to have made it. The place was swarming with communists. For weeks before my union leadership was flooding the campus e-mail system with announcements on bus transportation to Pershing Square. State administrative regulations were violated in this, but no one on my campus seems to care, as long as it's far left-wing agitation that's being promoted.

Anyway, Ringo was there, with an awesome photo-essay: "L.A. Teachers Unions "State of Emergency" Rally - Los Angeles, CA 5/13/2011."

And Reason.tv always features killer reports:

College is Too Easy

Bird Dog links to Mark Bauerlein's discussion of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's research on student learning and college performance. And that reminds me of the Arum and Roksa piece that ran in Friday's Los Angeles Times, "College, too easy for its own good":

We recently tracked several thousand students as they moved through and graduated from a diverse set of more than two dozen colleges and universities, and we found consistent evidence that many students were not being appropriately challenged. In a typical semester, 50% of students did not take a single course requiring more than 20 pages of writing, 32% did not have any classes that required reading more than 40 pages per week, and 36% reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week.

Not surprisingly, given such a widespread lack of academic rigor, about a third of students failed to demonstrate significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing ability (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) during their four years of college.

The students themselves must bear some of the blame for this, of course. Improvement in thinking and writing skills requires academic engagement; simply hanging out on a college campus for multiple years isn't enough. Yet at many institutions, that seems to be sufficient to earn a degree. At many schools, students can choose from a menu of easy programs and classes that allow them to graduate without having received a rigorous college education. Colleges are complicit, in that they reward students with high grades for little effort. Indeed, the students in our study who reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week nevertheless had an average cumulative GPA of 3.16.

To be sure, there were many exceptions to this dismal portrait of the state of undergraduate learning. Some academic programs and colleges are quite rigorous, and some students we followed pushed themselves and excelled. In general, traditional arts and science fields (math, science, humanities and the social sciences) tended to be more demanding, and students who majored in those subjects studied more and showed higher gains. So too did students attending more selective colleges. In addition, at every college and university examined, we found some students who were applying themselves and learning at impressive levels.

These real accomplishments do not, however, exonerate the colleges and universities that are happy to collect annual tuition dollars but then fail to provide many students with a high-quality education.

There's more, especially the discussion of why higher education got off track. Still, it'd be worth checking the book itself, for in my experience it's the absence of skills and the culture of anti-intellectualism that's most detrimental to college learning. I'm tempted to say I struggled with maintaining high standards when I first started at LBCC. But that wouldn't be quite accurate. Over time experience has shown how I can better maintain high standards AND improve student performance (it requires intensely personalized instruction, which is hard to do with hundreds of students). That said, I'm less rigid than I was 8 or 9 years ago, and in some cases that means I'm just plain easier (flexibility is key, which sometimes might mean "easier"). Professors are dealing with a range of abilities starting with students who'd be doing just fine at Berkeley or UCLA to those who can barely string a couple of correct sentences together. I'm sad sometimes when I meet students who literally can't read. I largely quit having students do expository reading in class (reading aloud) because I felt bad for the students who struggled to read through a paragraph from the textbook. It's not one particular demographic in particular, although a lot of Latino students are ESL and a lot of blacks demonstrate something of a stunted degree of formal learning, and I'm talking rudimentary basic skills acquisition. And worse, with the exception of the odd student here or there, black kids generally don't seem to care. (Don't even get me going about the black student athletes.)

School's Out

For summer, at Pat Austin's, "On The End of School and Classroom Discipline Measures."

I'm not teaching this summer either, the first time in 11 years.

Soquel Students Suspended for Wearing Plain White T-Shirts Deemed Offensive Signals of 'White Supremacy'

These kinds of stories are basically a daily occurrence nowadays. Saberpoint has a report: "Soquel High School Students Suspended for Wearing White T Shirts (They're Signs of "'hite Supremacy')":

Personally, I am at a loss as to how a white t shirt can endanger anyone's safety. It is absurd that a school principal could suspend students for such a lame-ass reason, in effect, acting as judge, jury and executioner. It seems he has punished these students for "thought crimes," even though he doesn't know for sure what they were thinking. He punished them "just in case" they might do something wrong in the future, and that greatly offends my sense of justice.

Mine too.

Teachers Scramble to Incorporate News of Bin Laden's Death Into Lessons

Well, I wasn't scrambling.

I had the presidency scheduled for two classes today anyway, and it was interesting, especially because lots of students were shocked to find out that the death pictures of Osama Bin Laden were fake. But we had some great discussion. It occurred to me especially that President Obama's tenure will be defined more than ever as a wartime president. He's already presiding over three wars, and the frequency of U.S. predator drones strikes accelerated under this adminsration, but we're now at a turning point in the war on on terror, and last night's success will redound to this president's benefit. (See CSM, "Osama bin Laden's death will boost Obama approval rating, but for how long?") Indeed, one student asked how developments will help Obama's public approval ratings?

In any case, here's this at the Orange County Register, "Schools quick to integrate bin Laden death into lessons":

Across Orange County, many teachers scrambled Monday to change lesson plans to incorporate news about Osama bin Laden's death.

Teachers led discussions of the significance of killing the world's most-wanted man, while students debated everything from whether the world is now a safer place, to the root causes of terrorism.

At Dale Intermediate in Anaheim, seventh-grade world history teacher Grant Schuster began his classes Monday with a slide show of images from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He followed that with the video from Sunday of President Barack Obama's announcement that bin Laden had been killed by American special forces.

Students in all three of his morning classes applauded at the conclusion of Obama's recorded speech.

"Many of students don't have memories of 9/11 because they were too young," he said. "Some of my students are asking if terrorism is over. But others are quick to explain that no, it's not. And we still have to be very careful."

Schuster also explained to his classes that bin Laden's death will allow families of victims of the terrorist attacks to continue their emotional healing.

"I would have been remiss if I didn't spend at least half of the period today talking about bin Laden," he said. "This served as a valuable teaching tool."

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