COMMENTARY

New Rule: Let’s Not Fire the Teachers When Students Don’t Learn - Let’s Fire the Parents

May 14, 2010

BILL MAHER, Host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher

EDITOR'S NOTE: This week's piece is borrowed from The Huffington Post. The humorist has a point worthy of further discussion. WSS>

Last week President Obama defended the firing of every single teacher in a struggling high school in a poor Rhode Island neighborhood. And the kids were outraged. They said, “Why blame our teachers?” and “Who’s President Obama?” I think it was Whitney Houston who said, “I believe that children are our future - teach them well and let them lead the way.” And that’s the last sound piece of educational advice this country has gotten - from a crack head in the ‘80s.
 
Yes, America has found its new boogeyman to blame for our crumbling educational system. It’s just too easy to blame the teachers, what with their cushy teachers’ lounges, their fat-cat salaries, and their absolute authority in deciding who gets a hall pass. We all remember high school - canning the entire faculty is a nationwide revenge fantasy. Take that, Mrs. Crabtree! And guess what? We’re chewing gum and no, we didn’t bring enough for everybody. READ MORE...

Some 41% of Hispanic adults age 20 and older in the United States do not have a regular high school diploma, compared with 23% of black adults and 14% of white adults. As of 2008, Hispanic adults with a GED had a higher unemployment rate than Hispanic adults with a high school diploma - 9% versus 7%. However, Hispanic full-time, full-year workers with a GED had about the same mean annual earnings ($33,504) as Hispanics full-time, full-year workers with a high school diploma ($32,972).

Source: Pew Hispanic Center

THE NEWS

ACADEMIC PREPARATION

Few states meet NCLB goals for English-Learners
By Mary Ann Zehr, Education Week
Only 11 states met their accountability goals for English-language learners under the No Child Left Behind Act in the 2007-08 school year, concludes a study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education. That same school year, 59 percent of school districts or district consortia that receive federal money for English-language-acquisition programs achieved all their goals for ELLs. Those are some of the findings included in three research briefs released this month by the Washington-based American Institutes for Research. The briefs are precursors to a much more comprehensive study evaluating implementation of Title III, the section of the NCLB law that authorizes aid for English-language-acquisition programs, which is being underwritten with an Education Department grant for $2.7 million over three years.

Florida high schools boosting graduation rates by removing struggling students from rolls
By Dave Weber, Orlando Sentinel
Florida high schools have been boosting their graduation rates for years by transferring thousands of struggling students to adult-education centers and then removing them from school rolls as if they didn't exist. Those who have fallen behind and are unlikely to earn diplomas no longer are part of the equation when school districts compute their overall graduation rates, so the percentage of graduates looks much better than it really is. Though Seminole public-school officials boast that their graduation rate last year was 92 percent, it is just less than 78 percent when the adult-education transfers are included under a new system of calculating that the federal government soon will require.

Hispanic dropouts less likely to earn GEDs than blacks or whites, report finds
By Tara Bahrampour, The Washington Post
Hispanic high school dropouts are much less likely to earn General Educational Development credentials than their white or black counterparts, especially if they are immigrants, according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Hispanic Center. The report, "Hispanics, High School Dropouts and the GED," found that only one in 10 Hispanic high school dropouts has a GED, compared with two in 10 African American dropouts and three in 10 white dropouts. Hispanics also have a much higher high school dropout rate: 41 percent of Hispanics 20 or older do not have high school diplomas, compared with 23 percent of blacks and 14 percent of whites.

Race and Region Often Determine Degree Attainment in Big Cities
By Ashley Marchand, The Chronicle of Higher Education
College and graduate-school enrollment in the nation's 100 largest cities increased during the 2000s, and often depended upon factors like race and geographic region. And nationally, a record 35 percent of adults held postsecondary degrees in 2008, an increase from 1990, when the rate was 26 percent. Those are just some of the findings from the inaugural "State of Metropolitan America: On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation," a report released on Sunday by the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based nonprofit research organization. The report examined a preview of this year's census data for demographic trends in the 100 largest metropolitan areas, including trends in higher education.

Using Data to Drive Performance
By Doug Lederman, InsideHigherEd
Pockets of experimentation and potential change are cropping up all over the place in higher education. Here, it's the OpenCourseWare movement. There, colleges are adopting "just in time" remediation. And over here, some states are changing funding formulas to reward institutions for graduating students rather than merely enrolling them. But what do the individual innovations amount to? Do they point the way to the sort of transformative change that, given the likelihood of constrained budgets going forward, is probably necessary if higher education is to not only sustain the current level of postsecondary attainment in the country, but increase it in the way many policy experts believe is needed?

Students arriving at college unprepared
By Christine Armario, The Indiana Gazette
Professor Derron Bowen teaches high school math to college students, patiently chalking equations on the board on basic arithmetic topics such as the speed of a driver on a 20-hour trip. Bowen's class at Broward College in South Florida is for students who didn't score high enough on an entrance test to get into college-level math. In all, about two-thirds of students entering the community college need to take at least one remedial course in math, English or reading. Nationwide, about a third of first-year students in 2007-08 had taken at least one remedial course, according to the U.S. Department of Education. At public two-year colleges, that number rises to about 42 percent.

Commercial campuses ready to fill gap
By Stephen Matchett, The Australian
The idea that only public universities, employing permanent staff and endowed with research infrastructure, can teach high-quality degree courses is already internationally obsolete. According to a UNESCO report on global higher education, 30 per cent of enrolments are in private-sector institutions, as businesses in Africa and eastern Europe meet demand the state won't, or more frequently can't, afford to fulfil. Other big growth areas include the Middle East (even the sniffy Sorbonne is in business in Abu Dhabi) as well as Singapore, Malaysia and China. And a new boom could kick off in India, where the national government decided last month to allow foreign universities to set up shop.

Africa’s universities learn to tap a precious resource: their alumni
By Megan Lindow, The Chronicle of Higher Education
The sign at the entrance to Obafemi Awolowo University proclaims this campus, renowned for its Modernist architecture and horticultural diversity, the most beautiful in Africa. A decade ago, however, the buildings were dirty and tattered, with broken windows, leaking roofs, and peeling paint. The decay was an outward sign of the turmoil that has gripped African universities over the past few decades, as their budgets have evaporated and their facilities crumbled. Plagued by cuts in government support, Obafemi Awolowo had few options for rejuvenating itself, recalls Roger Makanjuola, a professor of psychiatry who was vice chancellor at the time. Then he hit on an idea still relatively novel to most African universities: asking graduates for help.

Universities say students may face earlier loan payback
By Hannah Richardson, BBC News
The Russell Group of top universities says it faces a £1.1bn black-hole in its finances by 2012-13. The claims come in the group's submission to England's official review of student finance and fees. The National Union of Students has said students already pay "more than their fair share". The Russell Group represents the 20 most research-intensive universities in the UK, and includes the likes of Oxford, Cambridge and University College London. It says that without extra income its members will be forced to make significant cut-backs.

Cost Perceptions and College-Going for Low-Income Students
The Pathways to College Network and the National College Access Network have released a joint “Research to Practice” brief describing how many low-income students overestimate the cost of higher education because of inaccurate or incomplete information about financial aid opportunities. The brief finds that many eligible low-income students are not applying for or enrolling in postsecondary education in part because of sporadic, ineffective, or conflicting information about financial aid and the affordability of college. The brief recommends offering clear and concise information regarding the financial aid process to students and families and providing this information earlier in the education pipeline to promote college-going aspirations as early as seventh grade. The brief also features strategies employed by the ACCESS College Foundation which successfully works with low-income schools and students in southern Virginia.

From Chaos to Order and Back
In a new study by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, researcher John Aubrey Douglass reflects on the meaning of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education. He states that the California's Master Plan is arguably the single most influential effort to plan the future of a system of higher education in the annals of American higher education. "Despite popular belief, however, the Master Plan is more important for what it preserved than what it created." The study provides a brief historical tour on how California developed its pioneering higher education system, counters some of the myths regarding the Master Plan's development, and then provides an analysis of the current problems facing this system in the midst of the Great Recession.

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

The Swail Letter (May 2010).
In this issue: Trends in International Education Enrollment.