COMMENTARY

Feeling Very Olympic

DR. WATSON SCOTT SWAIL President & CEO, Educational Policy Institute

February 12, 2010

Anyone who watches the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic games feels the heart tugs of the world’s youth reaching for dreams nurtured over years and years of work. In Vancouver, there they are: hundreds of athletes, from over 80 countries, putting into practice what they have worked for most of their lives toward, knowing full well that the outcome may come down to one run, one move, one mistake.

As one can see, the Olympic spirit is alive and well in the Great White North. Although every country and every athlete wants to win, there seems to be a more “worldly” camaraderie than ever before: even from a fans point of view (mine), we want to see people do their best and let the best win. Even if it means our person loses. We all feel the pain and collective gasp when catastrophe occurs, such as the final run of the Georgian luger. READ MORE...

In 2009, approximately 91 percent of fourth-graders in large city schools received five or more hours of mathematics instruction per week, as compared to 85 percent nationally.

SOURCE: NCES, The Nation's Report Card: Mathematics 2009 Trial Urban District Assessment

THE NEWS

ACADEMIC PREPARATION

Teachers more important than polls
By Jay Mathews, Washington Post
Are schools getting worse when school favorability ratings are dropping? Celebrated author and education writer Jay Mathews tackles the issue of education and the Polls.

Expansion of A.P. Tests Also Brings More Failures
By Tamar Lewin, New York Times
The College Board’s Advanced Placement program is expanding in American high schools, but as it moves from being a program primarily for elite students, the number of test-takers who fail A.P. exams is growing — although not as much as the number of those who pass. According to a College Board report, about 800,000 public high school seniors in last May’s graduating class, or 26.5 percent of the class, took an A.P. exam at some point in their high school career, almost twice as many as took A.P. exams in the class of 2001.

In National First, Kentucky Adopts Common Standards
By Catherine Gewertz, Education Week
Kentucky yesterday became the first state to adopt common academic standards that were drafted as part of a nationwide initiative to establish a widely shared and ambitious vision of student learning. With a unanimous vote Wednesday morning, the Kentucky board of education approved the substitution of the common standards in mathematics and English/language arts for the state’s own standards in those two subjects.

Basic skill test for teachers still fails state's students
By Rosalind Rossi, Chicago Sun-Times
Starting in September, future educators will find it much tougher to pass the Illinois Test of Basic Skills for would-be teachers, but until then, they can squeak under a bar some call shockingly low. Currently, to enter teacher-preparation programs, college students can get as few as 35 percent of the math questions right and still pass the Basic Skills Test.

Schools face big budget holes as stimulus runs out
The Associated Press
The nation's public schools are falling under severe financial stress as states slash education spending and drain federal stimulus money that staved off deep classroom cuts and widespread job losses. School districts have already suffered big budget cuts since the recession began two years ago, but experts say the cash crunch will get a lot worse as states run out of stimulus dollars. The result in many hard-hit districts: more teacher layoffs, larger class sizes, smaller paychecks, fewer electives and extracurricular activities, and decimated summer school programs.

Obama Appears, Then Disappears, in Financial Aid Ad
By Jacques Steinbert, New York Times
The online ads on behalf of a Web site that calls itself classesandcareers.com beckon potential college students “to go back to school and get your share of the stimulus money’’ at “stimulus friendly schools.’’ To reinforce that a federal windfall might be just a click away, the ads even feature three people in mortar boards flanked by a photograph of President Obama. At least they did feature the president. But that was before The Choice reached out on Thursday to One on One Marketing, the parent company of classesandcareers, to ask if the use of the president’s image had been approved by the White House.

For-Profit Colleges Change Higher Education's Landscape
By Robin Wilson for The Chronicle
At a time when American public higher education is cutting budgets, laying off people, and turning away students, the rise of for-profit universities has been meteoric. Enrollment in the country's nearly 3,000 career colleges has grown far faster than in the rest of higher education—by an average of 9 percent per year over the past 30 years, compared with only 1.5 percent per year for all institutions, according to an industry analyst.

Anything But Studying
By Jennifer Epstein, InsideHigherEd.com
The latest snapshot of how University of California students spend their time suggests sleep and socializing were far more important than classes and studying to the average undergraduate there. But that was two years ago, before institutions and families plunged into economic turmoil, and things may have changed.  In a survey conducted on all nine of the university’s undergraduate campuses in the spring of 2008 and completed by 63,600 students, students on average reported getting six-and-a-half hours of sleep each night and spending 41 hours a week on social and leisure activities. Meanwhile, students said they spent a little more than 28 hours each week combined on class and homework.

More Latino students are going away to college
By Larry Gordon, LA Times
It took months for her homesickness to ease and the benefits of life in a new city to become apparent. But Jeanny Fuentes said she now has few regrets about leaving Los Angeles and her close-knit family to attend college nearly 3,000 miles away. By enrolling at Boston College, the 18-year-old freshman became part of a national trend in which Latinos are increasingly attending colleges farther from home.

Kandahar governor puts education on the agenda
By Josh Wingrove, The Globe and Mail
With 108 schools in his province crumbling and out of use, Kandahar Governor Tooryalai Wesa has a long wish list. He needs money, to refurbish or simply rebuild the schools. Once they're built, he needs thousands of teachers to staff them, for which he'll also need to expand the local teacher training college. And of course, given the volatility of the southern province, he'll need security to protect all the fledgling programs.

Don't go back to university, warn employers
By Nicola Woolcock, Education Correspondent
Graduate salaries were frozen last year for the first time since records began and will also stagnate this year, a survey of major employers suggests today. They said university leavers unable to find jobs should temp or do voluntary work rather than go on a gap year.  Too many unemployed graduates are returning to university to do pointless postgraduate courses that will not help their career, the findings indicate.

Developing minds
By Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen 
There stood Neil Turok in front of a thin audience last week at the University of Ottawa. A free lecture from one of the world's great theoretical physicists, a guy who works with Stephen Hawking. He talked physics, of course. He's a cosmologist, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., and has been on staff at Fermilab, Cambridge University, and Princeton. But then he talked about Africa and about education.

ENGAGED LEARNING IN A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY: Trends in the Undergraduate Experience
By Steven Brint, John Aubrey Douglass, Gregg Thomson, and Steve Chatman
Student Experience in the Research University Project and Consortium, February 2010
Center for Studies in Higher Education - UC Berkeley
Engaged Learning in a Public University provides findings from a 2008 census survey of undergraduate students at the campuses of the University of California. The University of California Student Experience Survey (UCUES) has been administered regularly since 2002, and is a product of the Student Experience in the Research University Project based at CSHE.

NATIONAL CAPITOL SUMMIT, April 12-13, 2010, Washington, DC

RETENTION 2010, International Conference on Student Success, June 9-11, 2010, Chicago, IL