California community college system takes a step forward in transparency

California community college system takes a step forward in transparency

Contra Costa Times editorial © 2013 Bay Area News Group San Jose Mercury News

When it comes to California's 112 community colleges, is the glass half-full or half-empty?

After careful study of the state's Student Success Scorecard for the community colleges, we are inclined to opt for the former.

We willingly admit that we have long seen California's community colleges as an undervalued jewel in the education system.

There was a good deal of hyperventilating from some quarters about the news that the overall completion rate for those who had entered community college in 2006 was clearly lower than the class that had entered in 2002. While we agree that is disappointing, it was expected and we caution against putting too much stock in this single finding, especially without some context.

The score card compared how well community college students reached their goals of transferring to a four-year school or earning a certificate or an associate degree within six years. We see that drop between the 2002 and 2006 groups as the "glass-is-half-empty" finding in the study.

Overall, the 2006 cohort recorded 49.2 percent of its students had earned a certificate, an associate degree or transferred to a four-year school within six years. The 2002 cohort had registered a 52.3 percent rate.

But one must consider that the 2006 group entered community college just before the extreme crash of the nation's economy. It is critical to remember that these students saw monumental changes in community colleges, higher education and the overall job market during the measured period.

As jobs became more scarce, four-year college costs continued to soar. Meanwhile, financial aid became more scarce and suddenly community colleges were deluged with students.

At the same time, community colleges had to absorb $1.5 billion in budget cuts, which dramatically altered the classes and opportunities offered at those colleges.

On top of all that, the four-year schools faced their own financial challenges partly by accepting fewer transfer students.

Given this conspiracy of events, it is a wonder that the completion rate dropped only 3 percent.

Which leads us to the half-full part of the equation. The study seems to indicate that the community college system is doing a good job reaching and improving the unprepared students, which is a critical mandate. These students who were not ready for college-level work when they arrived are making it through their first year and enrolling in a third straight semester at greater rates than students who needed no remedial courses.

And while the completion rate of both black and Latino students is under 40 percent, it is on the rise. Latino students are demonstrating persistence rates of about 66 percent, which is roughly equal to their white counterparts.

This is an important measure because about 36 percent of all community college students in the state are Latino.

But, by far, the most encouraging aspect is the score card itself. In an education system often mired in mystery, the score card is a legitimate attempt at accountability. We applaud its use and hope that administrators and students can learn much from its findings.

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At CSU, the beginning of the end for traditional lecture classes?

At CSU, the beginning of the end for traditional lecture classes?

By Katy Murphy Oakland Tribune San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE -- Students at San Jose State and other California State universities might soon find themselves watching lectures at home and doing their homework in the lecture hall as part of the system's latest experiment with technology and free online courses.

Encouraged by unusually high student pass rates in a dreaded electrical engineering course, nearly all CSU campuses with engineering programs are expected to join SJSU in offering a partly online, partly in-person course in the fall through a partnership with edX, a nonprofit online education provider.

Proponents have billed the free online platform as a powerful tool for professors, who will spend more time working with students and assessing their progress instead of preparing and delivering long lectures.

"Five hundred years ago we gave them a textbook, and in 1862 we gave them chalk," said Anant Agarwal, president of edX. "What tools have we given them since then? Please don't say PowerPoint."

San Jose State also plans to test the technological waters in other disciplines, such as humanities, business and science. It is paying edX nothing for the partnership, which gives participating professors special access to the platform to add their own content and check their students' online coursework.

Eighty SJSU students in EE098, an electrical circuit analysis course that all engineering students must take, were the guinea pigs for the new approach, which blends online quizzes and lectures from MIT with in-class quizzes, tutoring and exams.

The results were astonishing, even for online education's most ardent proponents: The pass rates for the two traditional sections of the engineering course offered in the fall were 55 and 59 percent. In the revamped version, in which randomly assigned students took the same final exam as the others, 91 percent passed -- by far the highest that Professor Khosrow Ghadiri had seen in his 22 years at the university.

The structure of the 80-student class, with its emphasis on in-class problem solving, is simply more effective, said SJSU President Mo Qayoumi, who noted another benefit: Only a handful of the students will have to retake the class, reducing bottlenecks in the system.

But there's another factor, too: The online videos and quizzes can take 10 to 12 hours a week to watch and complete, far more than expected in the traditional format. In addition, Ghadiri said he and his teaching assistants spend a combined 80 hours a week on the class, preparing materials, checking students' progress and sending them emails when they fall behind.

"It does require a lot more time," said Marisa Williams, a civil engineering major, taking a break from a group quiz on the power generated from electrical circuits and each of their components.

Entering the large lecture room after a news conference, Ghadiri stripped off his suit jacket and roved among groups of students, answering questions about a quiz. The gregarious professor, brimming with enthusiasm and information, knows not all of his students share his love for the material -- especially non-electrical engineering majors forced to take the time-consuming version of the class.

"They say, 'Why should I put so much time into something that is not my field? This is a core course, and I have to take it. Why do you make my life miserable?'" he said.

But chances are, at semester's end, they won't have to take it again.

Follow Katy Murphy at Twitter.com/katymurphy.

Posted 04/11/2013

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The Thin-Envelope Crisis

The Thin-Envelope Crisis

By Fareed Zakaria

Monday, Apr. 15, 2013  

It's time for the fat and thin envelopes--the month when colleges across the U.S. send out admission and rejection notices to well over a million high school seniors. For all the problems with its elementary and secondary schools, American higher education remains the envy of the world. It has been the nation's greatest path to social and economic mobility, sorting and rewarding talented kids from any and all backgrounds. But there are broad changes taking place at U.S. universities that are moving them away from an emphasis on merit and achievement and toward offering a privileged experience for an already privileged group.

State universities--once the highways of advancement for the middle class--have been utterly transformed under the pressure of rising costs and falling government support. A new book, Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, shows how some state schools have established a "party pathway," admitting more and more rich out-of-state kids who can afford hefty tuition bills but are middling students. These cash cows are given special attention through easy majors, lax grading, social opportunities and luxurious dorms. That's bad for the bright low-income students, who are on what the book's authors, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton, call the mobility pathway. They are neglected and burdened by college debt and fail in significant numbers.

The Country's best colleges and universities do admit lower-income students. But the competition has become so intense and the percentage admitted so small that the whole process seems arbitrary. When you throw in special preferences for various categories--legacies, underrepresented minorities and athletes--it also looks less merit-based than it pretends to be. In an essay in the American Conservative, Ron Unz uses a mountain of data to charge that America's top colleges and universities have over the past two decades maintained a quota--an upper limit--of about 16.5% for Asian Americans, despite their exploding applicant numbers and high achievements.

Some of Unz's data is bad. His numbers do not account for the many Asian mixed-race students and others who refuse to divulge their race (largely from fears that they will be rejected because of a quota). Two Ivy League admissions officers estimated to me that Asian Americans probably make up more than 20% of their entering classes. Even so, institutions that are highly selective but rely on more objective measures for admission have found that their Asian-American populations have risen much more sharply over the past two decades. Caltech and the University of California, Berkeley, are now about 40% Asian. New York City's Stuyvesant High School admits about 1,000 students out of the 30,000 who take a math and reading test (and thus is twice as selective as Harvard). It is now 72% Asian American. The U.S. math and science olympiad winners are more than 70% Asian American. In this context, for the U.S.'s top colleges and universities to be at 20% is, at the least, worth some reflection.

Test scores are only one measure of a student's achievement, and other qualities must be taken into account. But it's worth keeping in mind that the arguments for such subjective criteria are precisely those that were made in the 1930s to justify quotas for Jews. In fact, in his book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, scholar Jerome Karabel exhaustively documented how nonobjective admissions criteria such as interviews and extracurriculars were put in place by Ivy League schools in large measure to keep Jewish admissions from rising.

Then there's the single largest deviation from merit in America's best colleges: their recruited-athletes programs. The problem has gotten dramatically worse in the past 20 years. Colleges now have to drop their standards much lower to build sports teams. These students, in turn, perform terribly in classrooms. A senior admissions officer at an Ivy League school told me, "I have to turn down hundreds of highly qualified applicants, including many truly talented amateur athletes, because we must take so many recruited athletes who are narrowly focused and less accomplished otherwise. They are gladiators, really." William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, has documented the damage this system does to American higher education--and yet no college president has the courage to change it.

The most troubling trend in America in recent years has been the decline in economic mobility. The institutions that have been the best at opening access in the U.S. have been its colleges and universities. If they are not working to reward merit, America will lose the dynamism that has long made it so distinctive.

TO READ MORE BY FAREED, GO TO time.com/zakaria

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The Plusses and Pitfalls of Teaching Online

The Plusses and Pitfalls of Teaching Online

BY: DAN ARIELY, PBS News Hour

Dan Ariely is not just a great and funny teacher, but he's dedicated his life to making the world a somewhat better place. To that end, he's produced an online course on behavioral economics that already has attracted 140,000 students.

Dan Ariely: I am an experimentalist both in my profession, and in my nature. So, when Peter Lange, the provost at Duke University, asked me if I wanted to teach a massive open online course (MOOC), I naturally said yes (not to mention that he is my boss).

Among other things, this was an interesting lesson in the extent to which I can underestimate the amount of time and resources that it takes to produce such a class -- but all that is behind me now and the class is just getting on its way.

Here is my invitation video for the class:

The class is just starting but I am already learning a lot from it. I have learned that some students feel that it is their basic human right to get free education (they call it free but of course free in this case is a shorthand for "someone else should pay for it,") while the majority feels privileged to live in a time when such adventures are possible. I am also learning how generous and helpful the students can be toward each other in the discussion boards. And above all, I feel more connected to about 140,000 more people on this planet, across 138 countries. It is truly a privilege.

And if you want to join this adventure, all you need to do is to check out my class on Coursera.

The proprietor of this page, Paul Solman, posed a few specific questions. The first: How does the quality of online discourse compare to in-class discussion at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke, where I've taught?

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Tech guru seeks balance between devices, great outdoors

Tech guru seeks balance between devices, great outdoors

By Lou Fancher, correspondent

OAKLAND -- "Good Morning America" technology contributor and Yahoo! News "Upgrade Your Life" columnist Becky Worley lives a turned-on, turned-off life in the Oakland hills.

Up at 3:30 a.m. to chitchat via Skype with GMA hosts about rope-less jump ropes or how to "go green and get green" by selling your old cell phone for cash, the East Bay tech guru and mother of 5-year-old twins is devoted to the great outdoors.

"We don't silo ourselves in technology," she says, in an interview from the home she shares with her children and partner, Jane Mitchell. "We live here because we want to walk dogs, play in parks, watch Cal rugby games, paddle-board on water. Life is looking out and being out: not looking down at a computer."

Worley has been neatly packaged by the media in a sound bite as "the Martha Stewart of technology." But she's more like a geeky hardware gal, whose affinity and affection for nuts and bolts -- in her case, Androids and apps -- is unsurpassed.

Her "Upgrade" videos are shot in her Montclair home. Identifying a problem, she cheerily spins her all-American sports gal energy (she grew up in Hawaii; played rugby enough to have had a half-dozen knee surgeries) into practical, easy-to-follow steps toward a solution.

"It's like a cyber cooking show," she says. "I make people feel they'll be able to cook that amazing beef bourguignon."

She avoids the gizmo gargle of engineer-speak and translates trendy marketing lingo into language even a digital dinosaur can comprehend. But it's not just the Internet-challenged who flock to her advice column and public speaking engagements. At a recent Commonwealth Club event at the Lafayette Library and Learning Center, Les Baker, retired president of tech support company Western Data Group, was in the front row.

"It's the simplicity of the things she gives up that I like," the 60-something electrical engineer said. "You can do them, even without a degree."

Worley says that's her purpose. And making it personal is everything. "Technology with people is awesome. Alone, it's isolating."

Worley says the rate of technological change is "outrageous," but she's grateful because jobs like hers didn't even exist just 10 years ago.

"Twenty-five years after computers were modernized, we now think of them as appliances," she says. "We have high expectations for ease of use, but patience for difficulty has gone down. People need someone who can tell them how to use the technology."

Her favorite new "accessible-everywhere" toys are low-energy Bluetooth accessories. She likes a key fob that can run for a year on a button battery and will force a smartphone to emit a signal.

"You'll never lose your keys again," she promises.

Passwords are a huge topic, and Worley has advice about padding. Long passwords using common terms like "dog" and loaded with repeating symbols like ")*)*)" or ":{_:{_" are the toughest for hackers to crack and easiest for consumers to remember, she says.

She's thumbs-down on using Windows 8 without a touch-enabled screen. ("It's like coating yourself with honey and inviting ants over," she warns). Nor is she a fan of 3-D printing for the home user, $20,000 4-K TV's, cell phone carriers with "ridiculously expensive" data plans and parents who use an iPad like it's a surrogate.

"Barriers and boundaries are crucial," she says. "I'm not down for taking on work as my god. I have to remind myself a lot: When I'm playing, just go play. Stop looking at your phone."

But to survive in the digital world, where job interviews, bill payments, family archiving, home security, commercial transactions and education are increasingly online, Worley recommends practicing like an athlete. "Mastering social media is critical. Not just being efficient as a lurker, but as a contributor. Start as a utility player. Find a helpful hint that makes your life better and share it," she suggests.

Following her own advice, she says she's keeping her eye on wearable computing devices, like glasses and watches, and eye-tracking technology that allows your eye (instead of a mouse) to move a cursor.

"It made manipulating so much easier and typing on my phone so much faster. Like voice recognition, it's the beginning of bringing mobile gadgets forward."

Posted:   04/04/2013 10:50:19 AM PDT

To catch Becky Worley's Yahoo! News videos, visit http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/upgrade-your-life

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My Little (Global) School

My Little (Global) School

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

There was a time when middle-class parents in America could be — and were — content to know that their kids’ public schools were better than those in the next neighborhood over. As the world has shrunk, though, the next neighborhood over is now Shanghai or Helsinki. So, last August, I wrote a column quoting Andreas Schleicher — who runs the global exam that compares how 15-year-olds in public schools around the world do in applied reading, math and science skills — as saying imagine, in a few years, that you could sign on to a Web site and see how your school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world. And then you could take this information to your superintendent and ask: “Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?”

Well, that day has come, thanks to a successful pilot project involving 105 U.S. schools recently completed by Schleicher’s team at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which coordinates the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA test, and Jon Schnur’s team at America Achieves, which partnered with the O.E.C.D. Starting this fall, any high school in America will be able to benchmark itself against the world’s best schools, using a new tool that schools can register for atwww.americaachieves.org  It is comparable to PISA and measures how well students can apply their mastery of reading, math and science to real world problems.

The pilot study was described in an America Achieves report entitled “Middle Class or Middle of the Pack?” that is being released Wednesday. The report compares U.S. middle-class students to their global peers of similar socioeconomic status on the 2009 PISA exams.

The bad news is that U.S. middle-class students are badly lagging their peers globally. “Many assume that poverty in America is pulling down the overall U.S. scores,” the report said, “but when you divide each nation into socioeconomic quarters, you can see that even America’s middle-class students are falling behind not only students of comparable advantage, but also more disadvantaged students in several other countries.”

American students in the second quarter of socioeconomic advantage — mostly higher middle class — were significantly outperformed by 24 countries in math and by 15 countries in science, the study found. In the third quarter of socioeconomic advantage — mostly lower middle class — U.S. students were significantly outperformed by peers in 31 countries or regions in math and 25 in science.

The good news, though, said Schnur, “is that, for the first time, we have documented that there are individual U.S. schools that are literally outperforming every country in the world.”

“BASIS Tucson North, a nonselective high school serving an economically modest middle-class student population in Arizona, outperformed the average of every country in the world in reading, math, and science,” the report said. “Three nonselective high schools in Fairfax, Va., outperformed the average of virtually every country in the world.” One of them, Woodson, outperformed every region in the world in reading, except Shanghai. But the pilot also exposed some self-deception. “One school, serving students similar to Woodson’s, lags behind 29 countries in math but received an A on its state’s accountability system based primarily on that state’s own test,” Schnur said.

Paul Bambrick-Santoyo is managing director of North Star Academies in Newark, an Uncommon Schools network of nine low-income charter schools that took part and cracked the world’s Top 10. “We have always had state tests and SATs,” he told me, “but we never had an international metric. This was a golden opportunity to see where we stand — if we have to prepare our kids to succeed not only in this country but in a global marketplace.” He said he was particularly motivated by the fact that Shanghai’s low-income kids “could outperform” most U.S. schools, because this gave his school a real international peer for a benchmark.

“We got 157 pages of feedback” from participating in the pilot, added Jack Dale, the superintendent of Fairfax County’s schools, which is so valuable because the PISA test exposes whether your high school students can apply their math, science and reading skills to 21st-century problems. “One of my principals said to me: ‘This is not your Virginia Standards of Learning Test.’ ”

So what’s the secret of the best-performing schools? It’s that there is no secret. The best schools, the study found, have strong fundamentals and cultures that believe anything is possible with any student: They “work hard to choose strong teachers with good content knowledge and dedication to continuous improvement.” They are “data-driven and transparent, not only around learning outcomes, but also around soft skills like completing work on time, resilience, perseverance — and punctuality.” And they promote “the active engagement of our parents and families.”

“If you look at all the data,” concluded Schnur, it’s clear that educational performance in the U.S. has not gone down. We’ve actually gotten a little better. The challenge is that changes in the world economy keep raising the bar for what our kids need to do to succeed. Our modest improvements are not keeping pace with this rising bar. Those who say we have failed are wrong. Those who say we are doing fine are wrong.” The truth is, America has world-beating K-12 schools. We just don’t have nearly enough.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on April 3, 2013, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: My Little (Global) School .

Published: April 2, 2013

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