Has anyone seen this movie? I think everyone should. It speaks about problems in education and how some Charter schools have overcome this. (It is not about gifted education.)

DS10 seems to appreciate that his new school is better. He is still underchallenged and that may be part of his underachievement. I was thinking how lucky my kids got into a gifted school, with a free education. When is it a child can watch a movie like "Waiting for Superman" and get how luck they are? I wish he could see how blessed he is. Any thoughts?

I have not seen the movie but have read about it. Research has not found that charter schools on average outperform public schools, as discussed at http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/13/understanding-charter-schools.html . KIPP charter schools have a good reputation, but I think much (but probably not all) of their success is due to the attrition of weaker students http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/charter-schools/myths-and-realities-about-kipp.html . The movie's famous lottery scene is wrong to suggest that the losers are doomed to get a much worse education in a conventional public school than they would get in a charter.

I support charters and especially vouchers, which let parents spend the educational funds largely as they see fit, but the claims made for these reforms are exaggerated. The differences in average academic achievement across various schools largely reflect the differences in average intelligence across schools, but no politician or educational policymaker wants to acknowledge that.

The problem with comparing public schools to private/charter schools is that they are not working under the same set of conditions. Private and charter schools do not have to continue to provide services to every student regardless of the student's behavior, and cannot mandate/enforce involvement or follow through by parents. No amount of internal reform in the world can overcome that reality. Of COURSE schools with involved parents and enforceable behavior codes are going to look better than schools without. But how do you transfer that to the public school system? If public schools were able to kick out kids who consistently misbehave or whose parents did not play their role in the educational process, those children would go....where? Compulsory education in this country began in part to keep kids out of the workplace (where they would work for cheaper than adults) and off of the streets (where they could get into/cause trouble).

Given the sifting and winnowing that comes with parents being involved/invested enough to seek out alternate educational settings, these institutions would be FAR outperforming their demographically equivalent public counterparts if their methods were actually as superior as some would like to suggest.

As to KIPP schools....extended day, extended week, extended school year=extra money. On a relatively small scale, it is possible to fundraise to supplement what is available through public school funding, but there is ample evidence that most American tax payers are unwilling to support the school system as a whole at that level, and unrealistic to think that fundraising could make up the difference if there were multiple schools in the same city competing for those dollars. I also found it interesting that according to one of KIPPS Q&A sites, they only report acheivement scores for students who are in a "matched cohort". They don't promote students to the next grade who have not met the grade level requirements:

"When we calculate achievement gains at KIPP schools in our annual Report Card, we only track gains of those students who are part of a �matched cohort' of students. For example, in the 2008 KIPP Report Card, we reported the gains of students who started KIPP in fifth grade and finished KIPP in eighth grade."
http://www.kipp.org/faq

Isn't that sort of like only reporting the test scores of proficient students?

I think that KIPP is doing great things for a lot of students and I hope they will continue to do so--however, I think it is unfair to use their successes as a way to denigrate public schools (as is often done in the press) when public schools are unlikely ever to be afforded the conditions or funding that allow KIPP and other successful charters to operate as they do.

Charter schools work well for well-matched students. I think the problem is that many parents see "charter" and think "yes! I found my son/daughter's perfect school!"

I have worked in two charters over the past 12 years. One has been open for 18 years and is hugely successful. We have a 1% revocation rate (which means we kick out 1% of the students that are originally accepted). This rate is significantly lower(5-20% lower depending on which school) than the two high schools in our area- either their dropout or expulsion rate. Most people do not realize that traditional public schools CAN and DO kick out kids with continuous behavior problems.

We do service special ed students who can function with a push in model or a one to two hour a week pull-out model. We do not service students who need special day class or full-time emotional and behavioral support outside a mainstream class. This is a conscious decision on our part. It's not good education to service these students on our campus simply to have them around but not for them to have access to the programs we provide. We do have several students with full-time aides that are mainstreamed.

We also have FIVE separate programs and more than 1200 students, two of which are high schools. But each student is matched to a program that is designed to meet his/her needs. We have a high school arts academy that is all college prep, but arts classes are taught by professionals. The kids can take dance, drama, visual art or music at any level and up to 4 classes a day by end of high school.

Our other high school program is an independent study program where students meet with a teacher once a week, turn in work, collect new work and have a "check up". There is a huge variety of students in this program from pregnant teens and credit recovery students to professional actors and athletes who need time to travel without losing credit at school.

Previous posters are right- on average charter schools do no better than traditional schools. But this is really regionally dependent. It's like saying that overall, all school districts are the same. We know that on a case by case basis, that's simply not true.

My school receives close to 1,000 applications for incoming spots of 180 in two different programs that start in 6th grade.

My point in a nutshell: There are many, many success stories skewed by the charter school nationwide data.

Dottie- you are correct that charter schools split the traditional pool of money for public schools. However, in my district, the school district is about to be taken over by the state, due to extreme mismanagement of funds, corruption by politicians and board members who are trying to get elected to higher office but know nothing about education. The charters are doing just fine- because they have complete local control over their funds. In a year, the charter schools will be the only ones left standing.

In many cases, you cannot assume that the ADA of the public school would go up if the charter did not exist. Many parents would still chose other options for their students, particularly in very low performing districts. There's no way my son would attend the regular public school. The district GATE people have repeatedly told us that they have nothing for him and cannot accommodate him in a regular class. They've basically pulled the reverse of some charters and special ed students- "you can send him but we won't teach him." Too bad for them- they could use his standardized test scores :-)

In addition, most charters in CA do not have teacher's unions. While there are certain protections teachers' unions provide, most of my teachers are delighted that they work with colleagues who are well-trained, well-paid and if someone is slacking they get an improvement plan. If they don't improve, they are at-will and leave. It's that simple. Our district is currently paying 40 teachers to not teach because they have too much seniority to fire.

In an ideal world, with schools run by well trained educators, not politicians, I would love for every school to be run like a well-oiled machine. Students needs are met, teachers have additional training beyond the one year credential program and parents are welcomed into the classroom as advocates, mentors and volunteers.

I hear ya! I wish we only had 4 years... DS is only 8. We're homeschooling the next two years and watching it all burn around us. It's not pretty.

Around here, the top 15% of students either go private, Catholic or get interdistrict transfers to other districts for IB programs.

CAMom,

Do you think that what your charter is doing can be exported? Originally the idea was for charter schools to experiment and come up with effective models of instruction that could be brought into the other public schools. It sounds like you have a great program, but it already can't serve the number of students who would like to participate. Is there some reason your local school district isn't spreading what you're doing to other schools?

I am not at all opposed to public charters if they are funded through the same formula as the other local schools, but I am deeply concerned about public money being spent on private charters/private schools. Don't get me wrong, many public schools need a lot of work learning to effectively serve the full range of students who attend them. My main concern is that solutions which can only serve a few kids (not because only a few kids fit, as would be the case with services designed for children at "the tails", but because there isn't enough resource to go around)are problematic. A free appropriate public education can't be available only through lottery and I don't see any evidence that private schools can do better on a grand scale, so I don't want public money flowing out of the public schools and into the private (and sometimes for profit) education system.


Re: public schools expelling students for behavior. I would point out a) that students are not permanently expelled from public schools; b) the bar for expulsion is typically for much more extreme behaviors than those that can lead to the removal of a student from a charter program.

No easy answers, that's for sure!

Our model is actually exported from a school in Minnesota that is running very similarly. It would be easy to export each program individually but the school as a whole would be more complex. We have a huge facility paid for by bonds that allows us to do what we do. Because our school district is crumbling, we have many students who are not interested in our particular programs but want to come because it's a safe school with a decent education. It's a hard sell when you have an 8th grade boy who has to take ballet... but it happens to us every year.

I agree with you- but in CA nearly all charters are public schools, funded the same way as any other public school. The only difference in funding is complete local control over the money- as opposed to district decision makers deciding how to spend it. My principal makes all the financial decisions for us based on a teacher committee and recommendations of our local school board, not the district school board. This allows a direct control over contracts and vendors, negotiation at a level of minutiae that would bore me to tears and a focus on every penny being in the classroom.

Neither do we- any contract revocation is for one year and a student can reapply. We revoke contracts for behavior issues that are the same issues that a student would be suspended and then expelled for at any public school. We have to follow the disciplinary section of Ed.Code. We expel a student for drugs, violence, weapons on campus, sexual harassment, repeated fighting. We rarely have to do this because most of our students want to be at our school and work very hard to stay! Those that don't receive serious counseling (we're the only non-emotionally disturbed school in a 40 mile radius with a full time counselor), tutoring, home visits or whatever else it takes to turn them around.

I'm not saying that what we do is "normal" compared to other charters. But it just gets me all growly when I see charter schools getting the blame for all that might be wrong with public ed!

It depends on how a school is chartered here Dottie. You can get a charter directly from the state, which means that you are paid 100% of the regular funding that any school would receive and you're directly accountable to the state. It's more like you're a district of one school.

Most charters are district-chartered. The public school district has to review and approve of the original charter and renew the approval every 2-5 years (depending on the paperwork). The district keeps a certain percentage of funds for management. In our case, it's 3% of ADA that the district keeps. For that 3%, we use their internet servers, have access to make reservations with transportation (which we pay for) and have access to their liability insurance (which we pay for.) Some charters use their district's business office or HR. Ours does not- we have our own HR, business office, purchasing etc.

Now, the district does not have specific say in the programming but they do have complete access to the results. We have to provide an accountability report, just like any school does, to the district, who in turn provides it to the state. If we are not meeting our accountability requirements, we could be shut down by the district, have the charter not renewed or other measure. I briefly worked for a charter that was closed by the district because we did not have enough cash flow to make payroll and did not have enough assets to get a loan while waiting for the next state payment.

The other benefit funding wise, is that we have complete control over any donations or grants that we receive. The district, in most cases, gets to take donations made to a public school and pool them. So if Parent A loves Fred Elementary and donates $1,000, the district can take it and distribute it, give it back to Fred Elementary or heck even use it to pay a bonus to the Superintendent.

We have an elected board that serves as advisors and the school district also appoints a member to sit on the board. It's very oversight heavy and there are reports upon reports everywhere!

If I'm understanding what you're saying, part of the difficulty of exporting your program would be that it would require a substantial investment in new or dramatically renovated buildings in order to run in other schools. Is that accurate? Are you arts/production focused?

If I can ask another question: how do kids get to your school? Do parents have to do anything different in order to get kids there compared to what they would do to get their kids to the default school? In a lot of places I think that kids end up with uneven access due to issues like transportation, which is only within the capability of families where only one parent works, where the student is lucky enough to be in the neighborhood, or where the parent works in the neighborhood of the school; but it is out of reach for other families.

I'm all for (public) charters if access is truly equal and if they are not used as a way to slam other public schools that are not granted the same conditions (excluding kids with EBD, for instance) and which--unlike charters--often serve a portion of the population that is uninvested in being in school in the first place. Your observation that you lose few students because they want to be there is one of the embedded conditions that regular public schools can't match, and it is one that has a significant impact when it comes to looking at test scores and weighing a school's success or lack thereof.

You mentioned donations at one point in your post. Would you say that donations either in start up expenses, or on a yearly basis, are significant to allowing your program to operate as it does?

Thanks for all of your detailed responses--I am genuinely interested in how different schools are operating. Too bad you and Dottie and I are so geographically spread out--I imagine that we could happily sit together in a coffee shop discussing this for hours !

Oh how I would love to have coffee and chat! This is all so complicated partly because charter laws are so different from state to state. Some are more charter friendly but regulated (CA) others are very hard to get a charter approved (I've heard WA and OR) and others it depends on who you know!

Our original buildings were all leftover portables from other district schools. As school district bonds have passed, we have rehabbed or built new buildings. We do have one very large and quite beautiful theatre that was only recently finished. It was funded by bonds, local arts groups donations (who now have a discounted rental rate) and a couple of corporate donations. Up until the theatre was finished, both high schools in our district had better facilities. We now have a comparable theatre to one and the other has all the good athletic facilities.


Our school (like all charters in CA) has a public lottery. The only thing parents have to do is fill out an application and turn it in. We have preference categories where of the 90, the top 30 get in based on their art audition. The other 60 go in preference order- siblings of existing students, transfers from other programs within our school then anyone who lives in our district, then anyone who lives out. The lottery is heartbreaking and usually we end up in tears. If I could teach them all, I would!

What you've said about transportation is completely true. It is hard for many students to get to our school. However, our district has NO student transportation at all. So it's hard for them to get to any school. The city bus goes about 1/2 mile from the school and many students bus in and walk together. But most everyone, like every school in our district :(, walks or gets a ride. Due to budget cuts, this is our second year with no school buses at all. 15,000 kids have to figure out how to get to school.

Our school started 18 years ago and trust me, there were no donations as part of the start up expenses. It was a rickety old place with a crazy guy at the head (who is now our executive director!) Now, when charters start up they receive a statewide "Charter Block Grant" funding to get open. This is part of CA state law that allows startup funds for charters. This is very similar funding to when a district looks to open a new elementary in an area with an expanding population.

Donations now come in through three major fundraising campaigns. Each of the admin team is required to work these as part of their regular job and participate heavily. One is a major student field day where the students run booths and games for local families. Kids come from all over and play silly games or get their face painted and each student program makes money. The dancers teach quick little hip hop lessons, the music kids let the elementary kids "pet" their instruments in the petting zoo, etc.

You mentioned something about test scores and I wanted to speak to that for a second. Our test scores are not fantastic, they are very high average for the area. There are many far better high schools if you're searching for great test scores. We do not put heavy emphasis on test scores, test prep or student achievement data from the state's perspective. Students from 6th grade thru 12th grade spend almost no time in test prep before the high stakes spring test.

We spend a LOT more time teaching critical thinking and analysis. For example, in junior year, each student has to choose an American Artist to research and write an analytical paper (usually 8-10 pages) and present on the impact his/her artist made on American history. It can be any artist in the past 200 years and students choose a huge variety from painters and dancers to modern rappers. This is a huge cross curricular project that panels of 3 teachers work on with the kids.

We pay a lot more attention to SAT scores, college acceptance rates and how many of our students actually stay and finish college. It's a long range view beyond high school and we've taken a LOT of criticism for it because we don't heavily prep the kids for testing. But if you're looking out at a room of 40 students who are all artistically minded, usually daydreamy and thinking about the song they're writing or the painting left unfinished, bubbling pages after pages just doesn't work well.

Dottie- we have one city bus that runs the major north/south road through our neighborhood. It runs every 30 min on weekdays. That's it. From most big city perspectives, we don't have any public transportation either ;-) It is all downtown or in the bedroom communities.

We have recently pulled DD from a highly rated charter. Though the charter had some great things about it, it was very small, and really lacks the resources of a larger school. At various points we were actually concerned that DD might be kicked out. She occasionally melts down at school and there were simply no staff available to deal with this, as the school reminded us in tones of horror. Also, certain important school staff did not like her and in a school of this size, it was really an issue. Finally, they did not follow the proper legal procedures regarding G and T testing or IEPs. We feel the school has major bright spots but that power is mostly in the hands of one person, and oversight is lacking. In some ways, it is rather frightening. The school also tacitly discourages parents of children with special needs of any kind from enrolling. I know of other parents who have left the school for this reason--the child's educational needs were just not being met. The school DOES cherry-pick and is pretty open about this (our state's laws are somewhat vague on this).

The charter also does not offer buses or after-school care and recruits almost entirely through word of mouth, which ends up meaning the people who go there tend to know each other (the kids also often went to all the same preschools). They make virtually no effort to reach out to less advantaged students, and their enrollment reflects this. In a city that is about 50% minority, it is about 10% minority.

Overall, I have very mixed feelings about charters. I recognize that the system is in crisis overall and that some charters do excellent work and can really help certain kids. Our zoned school is absolutely not an option and I'm grateful that we have charters available, but they are a band-aid at best, and have some real drawbacks.

This is why the charters need to be based in the community they serve and entrance acceptance needs to be random or biased to families whose parents made poor choices earlier in their life, but who now are willing to make the commitment to do better.

Mr W has meltdowns from time to time and its a lot of hard work to get him to see that boo-hoo does not get him what he wants. We've come up with skits with his toys to get him to see how self control works better. He gets to do the skits for us and slowly it is making a difference. ( I got the idea for this from this forum. )

I disagree, because that effectively rewards parents who have "made poor choices" and punishes those who do not. My wife and I have worked to provide a stable and comfortable (but not extravagant) life for our children, and it bothers me when schools designate our children as "privileged" and therefore less worthy of certain educational opportunities.

I agree with Bostonian. Fair is fair.

I agree that Social Justice is as bad as racism.

But.

The original reason for charters and vouchers is because there are many poor areas and minority areas where the kids can be turned around by providing a stable, high-expectations environment for their education. This is done by rewarding the schools that succeed and penalizing the schools that fail.

It is very easy to set up a charter school and cherry pick kids. Its another to do it in the middle of the largest and poorest areas and make it work.

Which is harder - getting a bunch of kids whose parents are college grads and expect them to place in the top 10% of tests or taking kids from the other areas and get them to place in the top 30%? In which case are the expectations higher and the demands on the kids higher - and the comparable demands on the parents higher?

I do not think kids should be deliberately punished for their parents' errors. Every kid deserves to be educated to the best of their abilities.

In CA, the original reason for charters was to allow small educational experiments to begin and to be replicated in bigger schools and districts if they worked. You see some charters in academy models, some in technical models, some in residential school models. It is supposed to be a one-size fits some organization. The original charter law in CA had nothing to do with building up poor areas or supporting minority education. Some people started charters in these areas because of the ability enter education without a lot of fuss. It was easy to simply do no worse than the local school and still look better. Others had a true commitment to social justice and closing the achievement gap. But this wasn't and isn't the national intention of the charter school movement.


It is also illegal in many states to cherry pick students. A lottery is a lottery- numbers go in, numbers come out. Some charters are allowed lottery preferences where a certain percentage of students get in based on Title I, Free and reduced lunch eligibility etc. But it's still a lottery.

That's really the rub, isn't it? It's sad to me that we have to consider at all which kids get the "good" schools because of the type of community they live in.

Dottie,
That is our problem in Illinois as well. Property taxes are what drives school funding. How is that fair to kids in poor neighborhoods? The affluent areas here have better schools. And in areas where they have capped how much funding they can receiev, the parents (in affluent areas) have started school foundations which make donations to the local school for various needs.

The school that my son attends is a lottery based charter and as far as I know they didn't cherry pick anyone. Even though my son was admitted with special circumstances, he still had to be drawn in the lottery. The school agreed to work with me IF my son was drawn. Luckily the school was still mostly unknown when we applied.

The school was number one in the state in math, science and LA. This year with the lottery complete, there are 216 kids on the waiting list. It has a large minority population. New Mexico is 49th in education and there are few options for parents that can't afford to go private. I know how lucky we are to have found this school and even luckier that the school seems to be ideal for my son.

So interesting that this topic was brought up as I just saw "Waiting for Super Man" this past weekend. It has been on my mind since.

WFS does not say charter = good. In fact, they point out that fewer than half of charters are considered successful. What they do is talk a lot about drop-out factories. High Schools where for 15+ years fewer than 1/2 the students will graduate. They interviewed superintendents, teachers, parents who basically said if you go to that school, you won't go to college and probably won't graduate hs.

I felt the movie was trying to say, "This is America. Why would we fund and continue to run a school we know is failing children."

The big lottery scenes you see in the trailers were showing how desperate people were to get out of these terrible schools. They did complement some of the higher performing charter schools, but it seemed to me the real point is "why do we continue to fund poor teachers and poor schools at the cost of the kids."

WFS said multiple times, "we care more about adult concerns (i.e. people losing jobs from a school closing) than the future of these kids."

There were also several things said about how bad tracking is because the measures for tracking in many systems aren't valid measures versus a true fair method. And thus when kids get into the lower track, they can't escape it because they fall more and more behind. I think they were even saying there are GT kids on the lower track because of the biased entrance requirements.

This tracking part kind of tore at me a little because I'm someone whose child isn't getting what they need academically and is sitting in the high track. I can't imagine if there wasn't a track and he was getting less. But from a macro perspective I get what they are saying.

Anyway, the movie left me thinking. It made me feel fortunate because I have the ability and time to teach in the off hours. What about the poor kids who don't have someone.

Also, there were several moms who were trying to advocate for their kids and getting nowhere. For me, it was a reminder that it isn't just GT kids getting the shaft. There are really big problems here with the overall system.

There are some great public schools, but there are some really really bad ones too. That was the point of the film, many kid's futures are probably decided by some extent by the boundary lines for the district, which not only hurts many kids but also the health/future of our country.

I encourage you to see the film if you haven't already.

I believe this to be the heart of the problem. Great teachers, great schools + uninvolved parents, bad neighborhoods still = low success. The current educational system around here seems to combine the ideals of: slow down the pace of advantaged kids, give the disadvataged more time and school resources; give them the opprtunity to catch up. The problem is that this system still doesn't work. There are tons of "get involved" and "read to your kids" advertising in my county, lots community outreach programs, places to get free books, and several free pre-K and K preparation options, yet the ones who need it the most, don't take advantage of these resources.

My brother has 5 kids, he doesn't look in their backpacks or make them do their homework, because "it's the schools job to teach," not his. One of my nieces is gifted, he wasn't even going to allow the school to test her becuase he saw no reason. Luckily, the school convinced him otherwise, so my neice is now getting some enrichment at school. It makes me sad to know that there so many parents out there just like this. They never read to, play, or take their kids out to explore the world; even when it would cost them nothing but time. One year for Christmas, I gave my brother's family year passes to the local hands-on kids museum. They never took the kids once.

And so the cycle continues.

Wow, as disheartening as that is in general, that must feel even worse when it is in your own family!! That must be very difficult for you to see your nieces and nephews entering that cycle. Were your parents more like you or more like your brother?

Somewhere in the middle. We mostly lived with my dad in a low income neighborhood. He didn't really care about academics, school, or grades, as long as we weren't getting into trouble in school he was happy. He didn't read to us or try to give us a head start probably because he's not a good reader himself and he got by just fine. However, our dad, and eventually step-mom, always made time for us; took us camping, fishing, bike riding. My dad loved to play and get his hands dirty. He's a big kid himself, needless to say all the kids still love Grandpa!
I think my brother inherited his negative traits from my mother, with whom we didn't live, and by hanging out with wrong crowd in high school, he reinforced them.

Diane Ravitch has a skeptical piece on charters in the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/opinion/01ravitch.html
Waiting for a School Miracle
By DIANE RAVITCH
May 31, 2011

I like this article. I would not classify it as a skeptical piece on charters.

It is a piece that is skeptical of: inflated results and claims of quick fixes.

This piece sounds like a call to look at the underlying problems to find solutions.

I was skeptical of her article. For example, she complained that even though more people graduated, test scores were very low.

Maybe, but how low were they last year and a few years before that?

She also said that the school didn't seem to have done a good job of preparing students for college.

Maybe, but who says everyone has to go to college to be successful, productive, or happy? And isn't she setting the bar kind of high here? A school won't go from most of the kids dropping out to most of them going to college in only a couple years, regardless of other changes. It's as though she was saying that if a failing school didn't go from failing to a model of upper-middle class values overnight, it was still not good enough. And that this is necessarily a good thing.

Along these lines...


I work in family/education research, and can tell you that there is a huge pay-off when we invest in birth to 3 education and intervention. It's expensive, though, so no one wants to do it. Still, it's much, much better to get these kids started off on the right foot than to try to fix it later. No one gets this or at least no one WANTS to get it.

Geoffrey Canada, whose programs have been incredibly successful with poor kids in Harlem, starts before birth. You can read ablout it here:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/schoolhouse/archive/2008/09/12/the-zone.aspx

Well, sure, but so what? If my aunt was a man, she'd be my uncle. How is a description of an ideal world relevant to charter schools or the schools that she mentioned in her article?

Sure, I'd like it if all kids came from wonderful homes and the world was perfect. But it isn't, and the school system has to deal with that (just like the rest of the world does) and not blame families for the school system's own failings.

I agree--it's not that helpful to just wish that were true. My point is that there are things we CAN do (birth to 3 stuff, intensive intervention with new parents even before the child is born) so that kids DO arrive in K in better condition to learn.

That seems reasonable, but until all teachers are somehow given the tools to encourage high achievers not every child will be given more than babysitting at school. I think it's good for schools to teach all their students, not just one slice of the whole group. So I do think that pedalogical ideology has to change as well as home factors.

((shrugs and more shrugs))
Grinity

Oh yes, I agree completely. I really, really agree.

My overall point is just that I don't trust what Diane Ravitch wrote, and I was trying to give a couple examples of speciousness in her arguments.

Interesting. Now I am just curious... What is behind your not trusting what she wrote?

A Brookings study "The Harlem Children's Zone, Promise Neighborhoods, and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education" http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2010/0720_hcz_whitehurst.aspx reaches more pessimistic conclusions about early intervention in general and the Harlem Children's Zone in particular:

"There is no compelling evidence that investments in parenting classes, health services, nutritional programs, and community improvement in general have appreciable effects on student achievement in schools in the U.S. Indeed there is considerable evidence in addition to the results from the present study that questions the return on such investments for academic achievement. For example, the Moving to Opportunity study, a large scale randomized trial that compared the school outcomes of students from poor families who did or did not receive a voucher to move to a better neighborhood, found no impact of better neighborhoods on student academic achievement.[x] The Nurse-Family Partnership, a highly regarded program in which experienced nurses visit low-income expectant mothers during their first pregnancy and the first two years of their children�s lives to teach parenting and life skills, does not have an impact on children�s reading and mathematics test scores.[xi] Head Start, the federal early childhood program, differs from other preschool programs in its inclusion of health, nutrition, and family supports. Children from families enrolled in Head Start do no better academically in early elementary school than similar children whose parents enroll them in preschool programs that do not include these broader services.[xii] Even Start, a federal program that combines early childhood education with educational services for parents on the theory that better educated parents produce better educated kids, generates no measureable impact on the academic achievement of children.[xiii]

This is not to suggest that factors such as parental education and income, family structure, parental employment, exposure to crime, and child health are not related to student achievement. Such statistical associations are at the empirical heart of the Broader, Bolder claims. However, evidence, for example, that single parenthood is negatively associated with children�s academic achievement is no evidence at all that investment in a community service that intends to keep parents together will succeed in doing so, much less have a cascading positive impact on the academic achievement of children in families that are served by the marital counseling program. Per our recitation of findings from studies of Moving to Opportunity, Head Start, et al., efforts to affect achievement in school through broad interventions outside of school have little evidence of success."

<end of excerpt>

I don't wish to be taxed still more for still more social services, preferring to spend MY money on MY children. The party controlling the House is sympathetic to this viewpoint.

See the two points that I made in this thread.

I'm tempted to write a letter to the Times about this. Depends on time and energy tonight. I will also write more here at some point (on a deadline right now).

ok. Thanks Val. Somehow I missed your post at 10:18 when I read through the thread earlier.

Goodluck on yout deadline!

I did not read the article

A Brookings study "The Harlem Children's Zone, Promise Neighborhoods, and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education" http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2010/0720_hcz_whitehurst.aspx

but if the following quote is accurate,

"Children from families enrolled in Head Start do no better academically in early elementary school than similar children whose parents enroll them in preschool programs that do not include these broader services"

It appears to me that stats are being used to support an argument that is just not there.

What I mean is that apples are being compared to oranges.

A more accurate comparison would be to compare the success of head start students to similar students who have no preschool from the same area. (Not to the group that decides to home preschool), but to the group that sees no value or simply can not afford preschool even with financial help.

My reasoning is that parents who already enroll their children in preschool programs (or providing appropriate home environment) are more able/likley to provide the broader services that head start provides. While, parents who do not, OR CAN NOT will be less able to provide these services and student support.



I'm just saying.

Yes, I agree.
Perhaps a related point- in children whose parents try to pull them out of their local public school and enroll them in a charter school, but don't get in since they were not chosen in the lottery for the charter school-
Those kids have higher test scores than similar kids at the public school, even though the kid didn't actually enroll in the charter school and just stayed at their same public school.
Presumably parents who are organized/motivated enough to try to get their kids into what they perceive to be a better school do other things at home that help their child succeed.

A lot of social scientists do understand selection bias.

Look up Perry Preschool and Abecedarian for randomized experiments on early childhood education and their positive findings. (Yes, academic score increases diminish over time, mostly gone by 8th grade, but long-term the treated kids are doing MUCH better in terms of things like incarceration rates, teen pregnancy, dropping out etc., especially the girls). Both Michal Anderson (Berkeley) and Jim Heckman (UChicago) have recent work looking at the long-term outcomes of those experiments.

I can't remember specifically who did the work (other than Carolyn Hoxby and Jesse Rothstein, but I don't want to go there... there are less controversial studies), but there are many relatively clean papers looking at charter schools and school choice using things like school lotteries and other instruments as exogenous variation to get around problems with selection bias. It's not a solved problem, but not all charter schools and school populations are the same either. The current conventional wisdom among experts (who understand how to find causation) is that some charter schools are better than regular schools and some are worse. On average they're about the same in terms of quality, though charter schools seem to be doing about the same at a lower expense. Why and when that is is still an area of intense study.

I picked a school that Ravitch mentioned. She criticized Urban Prep's "miracle" by noting that test scores among 11th graders were very low:


Yes, well...hmm. She was comparing Urban Prep to the test scores for all the 11th graders in the entire city of Chicago. And she used the judgmental terms like "astonishingly" and "low-performing" to color her writing. I am a scientist and we are taught not to do that. The data is supposed to speak for itself.

I realized that she was comparing Urban Prep to the whole district. Then I learned that Chicago has this many public secondary schools. Some are in poor neighborhoods. Some aren't. It didn't seem correct to compare an inner city school with schools in distant upscale neighborhoods where 90% or more of students pass the tests --- especially given all the data on the subject showing disparities.

So I compared Urban Prep's test scores to other schools in its own neighborhood. The picture is much different. Robeson High school is about mile from Urban Prep. Test scores there are scary low: in 2010, not a single student passed the science test, 1% passed mathematics, 4% passed reading and 2% passed writing. Compare to Urban Prep: 16% passed science, 11% passed math, 25% passed reading, and 33% passed writing. Demographics at the two schools are nearly identical: >99.5% African-American, 98% low income. And remember that Urban Prep is new, and its students came from neighborhood schools. Note also that the school that Urban Prep replaced had the lowest test scores of any school in Chicago the year before it was closed.

Compare also to TEAM Englewood , which is next door to Urban Prep and where the percentage of passing scores on the four tests are 3%, 8%, 12% and 16% in the order mentioned above. Now let's go to Hope College Prep High School, which is about a mile north of Urban Prep. The percentage of students passing the four tests in 2010 were 12%, 16%, 9% and 15% respectively. Again, same demographics.

Urban Prep's website says that when they started, only 4% of their students passed the state tests as freshmen. If this information is correct, it looks like there has been a big improvement among students at Urban Prep by the standards of standardized testing. Given that most of the students came from the neighborhood around the school, the claim doesn't seem unreasonable.

Compare to Northside College Prep where 99% of the students passed all the tests. Or Payton College Prep, where results are only slightly lower. The demographics in these schools are NOT like those at the other schools (racial diversity and only 1/3 low income). They are 16+ miles north of the other schools but not too far from each other.

To me at least, it seems disingenuous at best for her to criticize a charter school that's doing better than the public schools around it. I suspect that ideology drove a lot of what she wrote. I can't help but think that if she was really trying to find the truth, she wouldn't have made such general statements or used such colored language.

From what I can see, Urban Prep is trying very hard to raise the expectations of its students. In the kind of environment surrounding them, I think this is really great. I doubt the same could be said of the schools surrounding it.

Phew.

Val

Quoting a Chicago Sun-Time article

http://www.suntimes.com/news/education/5061648-417/help-for-charter-schools.html
Help for charter schools
By ROSALIND ROSSI Education Reporter May 29, 2011 12:37AM

"Board members approved the renewal of Urban Prep-Englewood�s charter even though the school failed to meet its accountability targets, due to low test scores.

Only 17 percent of Urban Prep juniors passed their state exams last year, far lower than the district average of 29 percent. On the positive side, that beats the 8.4 percent passing rate in the neighborhood schools that Urban Prep kids would normally attend.

Chicago Public School officials said they were impressed by the intense college-going culture at Urban Prep, which has won headlines and personal kudos from Emanuel for garnering acceptances for every senior to four-year universities two years running. Its first graduating class included one senior who was accepted to prestigious Johns Hopkins, despite a 15 ACT score � well below the 18 often accepted at far less exclusive schools.

CPS officials noted that they put Urban Prep on a short leash by requiring it to come up with a plan to pull it out of what would normally be considered �academic probation� by the fall of 2012."

<end of excerpt>

Blogger Mike Klonsky writes this about Urban Prep:

http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2010/03/winners-losers-in-race-to-top.html

"The larger questions raised by Urban Prep's success have to to do with test scores, the cornerstone of Arne Duncan's school closing and turnaround policies under RTTT. Urban Prep's are nothing to write home about (I don't think test scores in general are anything to write home about, but that's me). According to the Sun-Times:

'The average ACT score of Urban Prep's all-black male student body -- 16.1 -- is below the Chicago Public Schools average of 17 but above the CPS black male average of 15.4. On state tests, Urban Prep kids fell below even the CPS black male average, with only 15.3 percent of juniors passing last year.'

It's interesting that the school's entire graduating class has been accepted to four-year universities even though only 12% of them met the college readiness benchmark in reading and only 36% met the benchmark in English on the ACT exam. And while UP's composite ACT score is a few (3) points higher than nearby high schools, it's important to remember that UP ISN'T a neighborhood school. It draws its students from 31 different zip-codes in the city."

<end of excerpt>

Sending lots of unqualified students to college is not something to boast about.

There have been many criticisms of the Brookings piece Bostonian posted.

I am open to the possibility that these additional services(including health clinics, discipline classes, classes for parents before the child is born) are not effective...this if of great interest to me, and I will continue to read up on it. BUT my overall impression from reading a good deal of work on this subject is that WELL-DONE birth-3 and preschool programs accomplish A LOT. They are CERTAINLY more cost-effective than programs later in life, and, need I point out, they cost a whole heck of a lot less than jail. Here is an abstract from a paper I recently read on this. Note how the annual return decreases as the kids get older. You have to start young, as in babies, as in expecting parents. I'm convinced.


Paper is Age 26 Cost�Benefit Analysis of the Child-Parent Center Early Education Program, in the Jan/Feb 2011 issue of Child Development.

In the NYT, Paul Tough links to and summarizes many of the reactions to Ravitch's column at

http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/education-reforms-two-month-warning/
Education Reform�s Two-Month Warning
July 8, 2011

I agree with Mike Petrilli's pessimistic/realistic response,

http://www.educationgadfly.net/flypaper/2011/06/the-ends-of-education-reform/
The ends of education reform
June 7, 2011.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903918104576500531066414112.html
Super Teachers Alone Can't Save Our Schools
By STEVEN BRILL
Wall Street Journal
August 13, 2011

A superstar teacher or charismatic principal rides to the rescue! Downtrodden public school children, otherwise destined to fail, are saved! We've all seen that movie�more than once, starting with "Stand and Deliver" and "Lean on Me" in the late 1980s and more recently with documentaries like "Waiting for Superman" and "The Lottery," which brilliantly portray the heroes of the charter-school movement. And we know the villains, too: teachers' union leaders and education bureaucrats who, for four decades, have presided over schools that provide comfortable public jobs for the adults who work there but wretched instruction for the children who are supposed to learn there.

One of the heroes of this familiar tale is Dave Levin, the co-founder of the highly regarded KIPP network of charter schools (KIPP stands for Knowledge Is Power Program). But Mr. Levin would be the first to tell you that heroes aren't enough to turn around an American public school system whose continued failure has become the country's most pressing long-term economic and national security threat.

...

Mr. Levin acknowledged that he was at least free to try because he was not straitjacketed by a union contract. He could hire and fire as he pleased, set work hours, move the staff around�everything that he needed to make KIPP work.

"That's totally true," he said. But "if you tore up every union contract in the country, that would just give you the freedom to try�. Then you would have to train and motivate not 70,000 or 80,000 teachers"�the number now teaching in charter schools�"but three million," the approximate number of teachers in American public elementary and secondary schools.


As Mr. Levin explained to me, "You can't do this by depending only on the kinds of exceptional people we have around here who pour themselves into this every hour of every day."

"I feel overwhelmed, underappreciated and underpaid," a teacher told me one morning at one of the Success Charter Network schools in Harlem. Like KIPP, these are schools whose students consistently top the charts in achievement scores, often testing at or above the level of students in affluent nearby suburbs.

"I work from 7:30 to 5:30 in the building and then go home and work some more," the teacher told me. "I get disrespectful pushback from parents all the time when I try to give their kids consequences. I get feedback from my [supervisors], who demand that I change five or six things by the next day. I think we are doing a great job, so I keep at it. But there is no way I can do this beyond another year or two."

<end of excerpt>

According to the article, there are

47.4 million students in public schools
3.3 million teachers in public schools
1 million students in charter schools
72,000 teachers in charter schools

School reform predicated on finding 3.3 million "super" teachers will not work.

I propose we convert all public schools to the Summerhill model (A.S.Neill) and let the magic work itself... :-)

Anyone in a job where they are pushed to perform will feel this way. Coaching people on finding an emotional outlet and finding time for them to take time off will address this. Getting positive feedback from parents, supervisors, and forming a relationship with the same outside of work will sustain teachers through the days of doubt. Its another piece of the puzzle.



The tyranny of low expectations, again.

I do not think there are any "super" teachers, just highly motivated, well-led teachers. We have a leadership deficit and a motivation deficit.

Many of these media mentions throw the word "failure" around.

What would success look like in a public school?

What would success look like in a school where nearly every student is Black or Latino? Where 70% of the families that send their children to your school each day speak another language at home?

What would success look like in a school where 75% of students are indigenous, and most of the teachers are considered foreigners or colonizers? Where sending your child to a school with better test scores is not practical?

What does success look like for mentally retarded students or those with multiple disabilities?

Actually, it seems to me that expecting "super" teachers is setting an impossibly high bar.

I agree that most people who are being pushed to perform will feel overwhelmed, underappreciated, and underpaid.

I wonder what "indigenous students" means. Is there any evidence that having white teachers is the cause of any group's undperformance?

I think that success depends on a lot of factors. Success in math class means you can do the problems expected of you at the level being tested (obviously, some people go beyond that). Success in college (at a minimum) means graduating. Later, success probably means getting and doing well at it or making a contribution in some other way. For my cat, success means stealing my other cat's food.

Understanding subjects like math and English requires brain power. The higher you go, the more brain power you need succeed. Obviously, hard work is essential, but I think brain power is an entry requirement. I speculate that most humans probably have enough brain power to master arithmetic if they work at it, and that most humans don't have enough brain power to master tensor calculus, regardless of effort.

The US school system refuses to recognize this fact. So (IMO) it defines "success" as "going to college" and pushes everyone in that direction --- even if only 12% of a graduating class is proficient at 12th grade subject matter. I like the idea of raising expectations, but I don't like the idea of misleading young people by telling them that going to college is the only way to succeed in life. I don't get that at all, actually.

If you have Down's syndrome, success may be holding a basic job. If you have amazing manual dexterity, being a top-notch car mechanic or lab technician or surgeon could be success. If you're great with kids, success could be running a day care business where the children thrive. Etc. For me, success is about pushing your own boundaries, doing something positive, and finding satisfaction (and hopefully happiness). (YMMV)

Like any other school.

Why is it that Asian communities are doing just fine? Just look at the Vietnamese Boat People or the current migration out of India and China to the US. Or the Nisei at the turn of the Century. Or the Jamaican experience in NYC. Or the Marielitos.

I think race is only a tangential question and overlooks the role of culture and the history of assimilation in the US.

In NYC at the turn of the century many kids from Europe spoke one language at home and another at school. The difference today is that the parents/culture at that time emphasized education whereas the Mexican/Black communities today look down on education. Kids who are geeks get beat up.

So, beginning from the beginning means that a "successful school" would start with intact families, then an emphasis on education and studying. Once these were in place, then a successful school would look like any other.

The dominant culture in most black communities revolve around sports. I go with my nephews to basketball tournaments in Texas. The non-blacks at the tournaments are less than 5% of the people present. I see no one in the family groups reading or otherwise studying.

I also go with friends to baseball tournaments. Its a pretty mixed crowd representing the demographics of the area as a whole. You will see siblings doing homework in the stands and lots of people with books.

Success in black culture means sports and maybe music, not founding companies or getting an education. You will need a sea change in culture and families to fix these communities.

Personally, I think intermarriage will change the communities long before the communities themselves alter their built-in biases to education.


Again it goes back to culture. Do you choose for your kids to study at night or shovel manure? Read a book or play outside? Work at the family business/chores or hang out with the other kids.


Mentally challenged people or those with severe deficits are a special case and cannot be lumped in with normally functioning people.

http://www.tsowell.com/speducat.html


I have a copy of this book. It's analysis is flawed in some respects, but it captures the essence of what Sowell's essay presents.

http://www.amazon.com/Rising-Rails-Pullman-Porters-Making/dp/product-description/0805070753

At one school where I taught in Hawaii, 3/4 of the kids had some Native American ancestry. Any other ethnic group were potentially interlopers, though ethnic groups like the Portuguese, Filipinos, or Japanese were more accepted, since their ancestors had labored in the sugar cane plantations and had some history in the islands beyond Voltaire's description:

"History contains little beyond a long list of those who have accommodated themselves with the property of others."

But indigenous would also include the First Nations who were in North America before the Europeans arrived and started planting flags all over the place.

One of the major problems in getting native students--even gifted students--to achieve academically is that education tends to contain some heavy value judgments and other content that make it seem like you have to assimilate to succeed. Many indigenous people do not want to assimilate to the ways of invaders.

http://honoluluweekly.com/cover/2006/10/break-point/

Some of us gifted heirs of invaders do not particularly want to assimilate, either.

You realize that NLCB requires Special Education students to achieve proficiency on grade-level benchmarks by the same percentages as non-disabled students, right? Even those with severe cognitive disabilities (mental retardation) are required to take alternative assessments that are based on grade-level benchmarks in my state.

And if too many families of disabled students write letters requesting that their children not sit for these exams (or if too many students stay home) the school will miss their participation target. Missing any targets would cause the school to "fail" to meet Adequate Yearly Progress.

Beckee,

I'm not sure what your point is.

You mentioned definitions of success; a couple people, including me, tried to provide ideas for discussion. Yet you almost seem to be looking for a fight and/or judging certain ethnic groups who might be reading as being "invaders" and "interlopers" who have a history of "planting flags all over the place."

I don't see the value in arguing about injustices of the past here. It's not going to get us anywhere and I don't think it will contribute to a discussion about educating gifted/HG+ students.

Sorry! I am feeling uppity today because our teacher's union's case at the labor relations board is--ugh. I don't even want to talk about it.

Much of the discussion here presupposes that all ethnic groups have--or should have--the same attitudes and expectations about education as the dominant culture.

"You will need a sea change in culture and families to fix these communities," sounds like if we simply force these minority communities to have the same values as us, getting their test scores to be as high as ours will be no problem. Well, that may be true, but it may not be a realistic goal, or an ethical one.

My wide-ranging experience as a human and as a teacher has made me question these assumptions and wish to hear a greater variety of voices on the subject.

Here's one:

"We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in your colleges, and that the maintenance of our young men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced, therefore, that you mean to do us good by your proposal, and we thank you heartily. But you who are wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things; and you will therefore not take it amiss if our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same with yours.

"We have had some experience of it: several of our young people were formerly brought up at the colleges of the northern provinces; they were instructed in all your sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad runners; ignorant of every means of living in the woods; unable to bear either cold or hunger; knew neither how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy; spoke our language imperfectly; were therefore neither fit for hunters, warriors, or counsellors; they were totally good for nothing.

"We are, however, not the less obliged by your kind offer, though we decline accepting it: and to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care of their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them."

Benjamin Franklin's account of a 1744 Iroquois speech at a council with the government of Virginia

Quoted in Blaisdell, Bob, ed. (2000) Great Speeches by Native Americans, Dover Thrift Editions.

Beckee, I really appreciate your sympathy, but I think you are misinformed.

Lets examine literacy among the native tribes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah


Pretty stunning, huh? Not only did an Indian invent writing, he did a Daniel Webster on the dictionary side, made printing presses, taught others in his tribe, who then wrote newspapers and translated books And they became far more literate than their white neighbors and built a very modern nation in the span of just one generation. There really is no precedent for what Sequoyah or the Cherokee did.

There times that I wonder what the average IQ of those original tribes were and what Sequoyah's was. I'd bet it was close to 120 as a whole and 180+ for him.

As for your original topic.

I am part Apache and Cherokee. My sister is married to a Choctaw. I grew up in Oklahoma where just about everyone is part Indian.

Thank goodness I look white to most people or I cannot imagine how much worse things would have been in school for me.

Instead of me not being allowed to go to the library because I was too young, I could be kept from the library because it would be "unethical."

If you really don't see the difference between Iriquois in the 1700s and American minorities in the 2000s, you should not be teaching. The Iriquois probably expected to live in their own communities and not to live and work with whites. American students of all races need to function in what you call the "dominant culture" in order to make a living. They need to learn standard written (and spoken) English, math, and science to the extent of their abilities.

Trust me, every single one of my 130 sixth graders in my extremely diverse social studies classes got the College-Is-Important speech from me last week. Which apparently triggered at least one, long College-Is-Important speech from a parent in the car.

At the same time, I was keenly aware that some of my students will never hear that speech from their parents lips. One of the parents on the school community council at a school where I used to work told me her son's teacher had suggested that the mom try reading for fun in the hopes that her son might pick it up, too.

But I didn't tell my students they have to go to college. That's not my place, and my own 6th grade teacher reminded me last week that college is not for everyone. I did back up my stance with a bunch of evidence, mostly charts and graphs about income. Then I showed them how education had opened doors for me in my own life and also showed them a recruiting video for my private, liberal arts alma mater.

Eventually, these kids will have to decide for themselves if they are going to college. Some of them will find financial and moral support for that endeavor in their families or their community. Some of them will return from college and find they have become outsiders in their own community, with no real place in their community, until some kid says he has to go to court and needs a cultural interpreter.

I grew up in rural, southern Appalachia. I qualify for Mensa, the DAR, and the Daughters of the Confederacy--if I ever decide I'm interested in such membership. I don't see that it's my place to tell people with a very different set of beliefs and experiences how they should live. I can give them the data to help them make a rational decision once I've built a relationship built on mutual respect. That's about all I can expect to do.

That, and teach my 'okole off!

Your teacher was right. College isn't for everyone, and recent studies are questioning the value of burying yourself in debt in the name of getting a BA (search for "Is college worth it?"). US society has romantic ideas that going to college is a magical key to overcoming all kinds of problems. And this sends a message that devalues jobs that don't require a college degree.

Not everyone can or should go to college. Not everyone is smart enough. Some people are interested in other stuff. And that's okay. Not everyone is suited to being a top-notch electrician either. That's also okay. Why take on a debt of $20K or $30K or more (google "average college debt") to get a degree in something you aren't terribly interested in or good at? There's more than one way to become a happy and productive human being.

IMHO, charts showing higher earnings for college grads don't account for other factors that affect earnings. Why be a mediocre marketing associate when you could be a really good plumber? Why do we value having more BA-credentialed marketing associates or sales reps? I don't get it. I'd rather have more highly skilled plumbers.

Do you think that it's possible that by making a sweeping statement like "college is important" makes you part of a machine that's telling your students what to do? By saying it that way, are you also telling them that anything but college is less worthy? This seems odd for someone who doesn't like to tell ethnic minorities that they should assimilate.

Food for thought.

I think I would have been much better off if I had never gone to college. For all the time I spent there, I could never figure out what the point was for me being there.

I'm pretty sure I graduated in much worse shape than when I started.

It kind of felt like I was imprisoned for several years.

This is a bit tangential but, kind of in f/u to your questions:
At our local public grade school, Asians make up 20% of our school (according to the school website). The AVERAGE STAR test result (STAR test is a yearly achievement test kids take in California) for the Asian kids out of a total of 1000 points was 980. The average for white students was 930 and for Hispanics was 870.
Alot of the Asian kids I have met at our school come from lower income families and they speak Chinese as their native language.

Not really tangential, since in traditional Chinese culture, doing well in school is almost the only way for students to please their parents. My 6th graders in Taiwan didn't even have household chores because they were supposed to concentrate on school and their cram school lessons (like the ones I taught on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons when the kids got out of school early).

We are talking about cultural values here, in addition to the value of college, education as assimilation, and a few other complex issues.

I don't know that I would have given the College is Important speech when I was teaching on the smaller island where 3/4 of the students were indigenous. For one thing, it would be cruel. They would have to leave their island to finish a four-year degree, and many of them had no intention of doing that. Besides, I was a new (to the island) teacher from North America, and nobody was taking me seriously anyway.

What about ability? Not everyone is smart enough to go to college. Encouraging people who fit this definition to go to college is, in my opinion, wrong (cruel, even). It sets them up for failure and feelings of inadequacy, saddles them with debt, and doesn't guarantee that they'll find a job (much less a job that they'll enjoy and do well).

I don't understand what is so wrong with admitting this fact. It would be great if everyone was capable of getting a college education, but wishing this were so won't make it so. I believe that our education system has a duty to help students discover what they're good at --- even if it's not something that's taught at college.

I know that it would have been nice if my college scholarship wasn't locked into engineering, a subject in which I had absolutely no interest.

So, instead of learning something I wanted to learn about in college, I was stuck in something. I had to make that decision prior to college to get the $$$ and if you dropped out of that college to pursue another major.

I had no idea what engineering was, only that my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to do it.

So, I took up somebody's space who would have actually wanted to do engineering and I wasted everybody's time and money.

Well, let me ask a few questions:

What is an appropriate age to start talking to students in general about college and other long-term goals?

What is an appropriate age to start talking to your own kids about these goals?

What is an appropriate age to say to a student, for whatever reason, oh, Honey, college is not for you?

On what criteria should we base that last decision? IQ? Task commitment and other "soft skills"? Maturity? Clarity of personal goals? Parents socio-economic status? Support of higher education as a value in family/culture/community?

There's no need to get angry or make assumptions about my attitude. Or that not going to college is a sign of failure or inadequacy.

As I noted, I believe that our schools are failing their students by pushing everyone to go to college, which results in not helping many of them find where their talents are. They get saddled with debt, stuck in unsatisfying jobs, and many don't get a chance to develop professionally. I think this is cruel.

There is an unsubtle message in the college-is-essential speech: people who don't go to college are somehow less worth or have failed.

You seem to be getting angry at the suggestion that our society shouldn't push everyone to go to college. I've experienced this reaction in others as well, and I don't understand why so many people look down on trades and jobs that don't require a college degree Many are critical to the function of any society, and many people who have these jobs lead productive happy lives and deservedly earn the respect of others around them. Why such a negative reaction on your part?

I think it should be the opposite, college as a choice, with a goal, not as a default.

Okay, you said that much better than I did.

I'm not even a little bit angry. I'm asking questions because it leads to interesting and useful discussion. Is there an overlap between the time it is meaningful to talk about going to college, and the time "College is not for everyone" becomes "College is not for Student X in particular"?

And is there an overlap or a mismatch between who makes that decision for an individual and who *should* make that decision? Is that decision made more often on the characteristics of the parents than the characteristics of the child?

And does a teacher's decision to not encourage her students, in general, to attend college have every bit as much impact as deciding to encourage all of them?

I'm not as familiar with scholarships based on your major, as I went to a liberal arts college where one was expected to decide on a major after a few semesters of taking everything. My good friend was a talented artist, but she was from a working class family who had suffered much hardship (like losing all their possessions in a warehouse fire) and she couldn't afford the paints.

She thought about biology, having done a science fair project with white mice in high school. but didn't have the talent in that subject to go much beyond introductory courses. Then it turned out she was good at political science and passionate about arms control. She's a high ranking government official who travels on a diplomatic passport these days, and I don't believe she often thinks about art or biology.

Objective measures of college readiness find large racial gaps (see the articles below), which I don't think can be closed. Policymakers don't want to admit that. The Republican party is the natural home for pessimism/realism on gap closing, but Bush gave us just the opposite -- No Child Left Behind.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0817/ACT-scores-up-more-US-students-ready-for-college
ACT scores up, more US students ready for college
By Amanda Paulson, Staff writer / August 17, 2011
Christian Science Monitor

...

The ACT�s college-readiness benchmarks � based on actual grades earned by students � are the minimum scores that indicate a student has a 75 percent chance of earning a C or better, or a 50 percent chance of earning a B or better, in a first-year credit-bearing college course.

...

The results also showed a significant race-based achievement gap. Just 4 percent of African-Americans met the benchmarks in all four subjects, compared with 11 percent of Hispanics and American Indians, 15 percent of Pacific Islanders, 31 percent of whites, and 41 percent of Asian-Americans. At least 50 percent of African-American, Hispanic, and American-Indian students didn�t meet any of the four benchmarks.

<end of excerpt>

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/n...tes-meet-college-readiness-standard.html
College-Readiness Low Among State Graduates, Data Show
By SHARON OTTERMAN
New York Times
June 14, 2011

Heightening concerns about the value of many of its high school diplomas, the New York State Education Department released new data on Tuesday showing that only 37 percent of students who entered high school in 2006 left four years later adequately prepared for college, with even smaller percentages of minority graduates and those in the largest cities meeting that standard.

In New York City, 21 percent of the students who started high school in 2006 graduated last year with high enough scores on state math and English tests to be deemed ready for higher education or well-paying careers. In Rochester, it was 6 percent; in Yonkers, 14.5 percent.

The new calculations, part of a statewide push to realign standards with college readiness, also underscored a racial achievement gap: 13 percent of black students and 15 percent of Hispanic students statewide were deemed college-ready after four years of high school, compared with 51 percent of white graduates and 56 percent of Asian-Americans.

...

*sigh*

Hi! My DD9 has been serious about Ballet and since 6 she has been in a pre-professional Ballet program (an hour away from our home). She thinks she would like to be in a company. To be a successful Ballet Dancer, one most often joins a company out of high school. She is smart, creative, motivated in all things. I am taking it a day at a time. Should I tell her to set her Ballet hopes lower so she can attend a university? I wonder all the time if the hours at Ballet will be taking away from extra curricular school related opportunities..or are distracting to her schooling. I wonder if she changes her mind later and wants to be a docter, or whatever, she will regret the years spent trying to be the best Ballet dancer. I guess you can only support them now, and hope that you are doing the right thing for later. But I certainly don't think that everone should or needs to go to college. (I've also though about having her accelerated so she graduates early, she can join a company at 16 and then go to college and 18 or 19...) No matter how hard you plan, college just isn't in the cards for some people and the last thing I want is to make her feel like a failure for chosing her passion over college. So, although we talk about what college she might go to some day, we also talk about which company she may be asked to join. I have a gifted neice who graduated HS at 16, got married and had a baby at 17 and bought a house at 18. I'm not at all thrilled with her decision, but she is the best mom and wife ever and she is so happy researching cloth diapers, baby food, educational toys and babysitting. College just doesn't make everybody happy.

The decision should be made by the student and no one else! If the parents can't afford the costs, the student has to find a way to pay for it, if his goal is really that important to him. I did that when I wanted to do graduate work in a field outside my major, and knew that I needed an extra year of classes in order to qualify.


Hmm...from this and other posts, it seems that you're defaulting to encouraging everyone to go to college and that not going is somehow carries a stigma. College should really only be a target for, at most, about a quarter of the population (but probably more like 20% or less).

Unless your students are a lot more capable than people on average in the rest of the world, most of them aren't capable of getting a traditional college education. Encouraging them to go as a general rule is, IMO, lying to them and is cruel for reasons I laid out in previous messages. But here are more reasons:

Our society has been encouraging too many people to go to college for too long. One result of this is a proliferation of watered-down programs that don't require a lot of reading and writing, among other things. The effects are showing --- there's a national discussion around the so-called college bubble, and a big recent study found that many college grads didn't learn much while they were in school. For example, here's a summary of a report called Academically Adrift.

I spent a three years as an adjunct at a community college and work with college-aged people now. Too many of them check off their "gen ed" requirements as a laundry list of stuff to get out of the way. They're very matter-of-fact about it and don't seem especially interested in biology or philosophy or history or whatever. I don't get a sense of the joy of learning from them. The gen ed classes are just another hurdle to clear. I'm not dumping on the students here: I'm criticizing a system that tells them to go to college without considering whether or not college is actually the best option for them.

And as Austin pointed out earlier today, they're yoked to their student loans for life. Read the article in The Atlantic that he found.

I'd very much like to know why you encourage all or most of your students to go to college.

Well, let's see. The data shows that people who go to college make more money and find it easier to find a job in both good times and bad. That people with graduate degrees are more likely to find their work satisfying and interesting. The data show that people in their twenties just don't make much money, but that education makes a big difference in earnings for the majority of adults' working lives.

My own experience as a teenager from the working class and a high school with "Vocational" in the name was that college was a busy, joyful and life-changing experience. Most of my satisfying friendships are from my college years. Education led to many opportunities for a wide range of experiences.

And teaching students without goals is like pushing ropes on a daily basis. I see a thousand little decisions that students make having more of an impact than IQ.

Recent data isn't showing that (see the links I've provided and the one that Austin provided), which is why reports like Academically Adrift are surfacing and why we're having a national conversation about the college bubble. '

You've said that "the data shows that..." but you haven't given me any links to support what you're saying. How old is that data? Does it come from a time when most people didn't go to college?

With respect, that argument that college grads earn more money is somewhat hackneyed (and I don't think that going to college with a primary goal of earning more money as a result is a great idea). Worse, too many people just seem to accept that argument without questioning it.


Do you mean that you think that other people's experiences will mirror yours? Hmm. What about everything that JonLaw has said and other comments on this thread that offer different perspectives?


I'm getting the sense that you're saying that college is the only goal. I don't understand that.

As for other decisions having more of an impact than IQ, yes, I agree. But when it's time to write a 20-page term paper or make complex calculations, IQ is a significant barrier, and there's really no way around it unless your IQ is around one standard deviation above the mean or more. Which brings us back to watered-down programs that don't offer meaningful education.

What are your thoughts on reports like Academically Adrift and the national $1 trillion student loan burden?

I'm beginning my preliminary investigation into SLABS...the packaged securitized student loan thingy for investors.

The educational finance model permits real compound growth with respect to student loan debt. This is then passed on to colleges and universities in the form of real compound growth in tuition with students taking on the risk of paying this money back.

Put simply, colleges and universities increase tuition faster than inflation. We all know this. Everyone complains about it. But nothing ever happens.

Colleges and Universities use the compound tuition growth model to ratchet up costs, year after placid academic year, with no discernable improvement in anything except massive resort-type facilities for students. However, this idiotic system has never come face to face with a major economic paradigm shift before.

The fuse for the coming major discontinuity in the world of educational finance has been lit.

Perhaps what we should really be doing is encouraging students not to close doors too early. When DH was in highschool, a counselor told him matter of factly that he wasn't ever going to go to college and steered him away from some key classes needed to be admitted to college (as he handed him information on enlisting in the military). DH had no interest in the latter and at the time took the counselor at his word regarding the former. When he determined that in fact he did want to go to college a mere two years later, he had to first enroll in a 2 year program that offered some of the courses required for college entrance. While he actually liked the two year college better (smaller class sizes relative to the giant lecture halls at the university we attended), it added to his overall college expense since he had to pay for courses he could have taken for free in highschool. In many ways it makes the most sense to me to counsel students not to close doors too early. As the world continually changes, it is unrealistic to assume that we know what the best opportunities for a student will be ten years down the line.

I have mixed feelings about college being/not being for everyone. It doesn't make sense to saddle people with debt to go in directions that minimize their talents. It doesn't make sense to deflate college expectations to make the classes more accesible to students who are less academically talented. But....I am uncomfortable with the sugar coated and skewed version of social studied taught in K12, which I think leaves adults unprepared to think critically about social policy and geopolitical policy/decision making. When I think about wanting people to go to college, it has less to do with their employment prospects than it does with wanting more of our total population to be more broadly educated. It seems like a lot of institutions offer either an associates degree program or a bachelors degree program. It would be nice if associate degree possibilities were the norm at four year colleges. Those breadth requirement classes could offer something a step above high school (for those who can handle those classes, but perhaps not the intermediate/advanced college classes) without expecting "everyone" to follow a route that may be either unsuited or unnecessary to their job propects. Just thinking aloud....

Beckee is correct that college graduates earn more than non-graduates, but some fraction of the earnings differential results from the higher average intelligence and persistence the college grads had when they started college. Anthony Carnevale has recently documented what he terms "The College Payoff" http://cew.georgetown.edu/collegepayoff/ , and Richard Vedder, an economist who is more skeptical of the value of college, has commented on the report:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/americans-over-or-under-educated/30007
Americans: Over- or Under-Educated?
Chronicle of Higher Education
August 8, 2011

Carnevale's method is to look at the 2009 earnings by education level and to estimate career earnings from this.

I linked to this report the other day. I think it was in this thread, but it's easier to link it again than go back and find it:

http://pewsocialtrends.org/files/2011/05/Is-College-Worth-It.pdf

I know there's a lot of information there, but you will find the calculation on page 83 and the graphs on pages 88 & 99 particularly germane. Also, the bar graph on page 36 that shows 86% of college graduates polled who said college was a good investment for them personally.

Here's more recent data from Planet Money:
http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2011/04/01/Unemployment-by-education.jpg?t=1301669694&s=51

And the article from whence it came:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/01/135036740/6-ways-of-looking-at-unemployment

If you do not agree with my stance that college is important, you have the right to ignore me and find data to support your own stance. So do my students. If you think money is a terrible reason to go to college, it's not my favorite either, but my students need to make an informed decision on something that may have such a big impact on their futures.

For the record, I was teaching stance and evidence and had presented "stance" as being somewhere between opinion and hypothesis when I showed a slide that said, "Stance: College is important". The evidence I presented clearly showed that most people with a high school diploma had jobs and that some people with graduate degrees did not find their jobs interesting.

My students had been learning mean, median, and mode in math class, and we talked about the fact that there are always people in each category who make more than the average and people who make less. For example, a kid called Bill Gates got into Harvard, but decided he'd rather start a company called Microsoft than graduate. My students came up with their own examples of relatives that make a decent living without a college degree, and some can already recite the College Is Important speech they got from their own parents.

Yes, but to get a complete picture you must also poll the people who started college and dropped out.

A four-year liberal arts degree is for the top 20% or less of the IQ distribution, as Val wrote, and students of average intelligence should consider other post-high-school paths. A good paper discussing this is

"Beyond One-Size-Fits-All College Dreams: Alternative Pathways to Desirable Careers" , published in American Educator, v34 n3 p2-8, 10-13 Fall 2010 (the magazine of the American Federation of Teachers).

at
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall2010/Rosenbaum.pdf . Here is the abstract:

The vast majority of high school students plan to attend college--and believe that a bachelor's degree all but guarantees them a high-paying job. What many of them don't know is that those who are not well prepared are not likely to graduate. They also don't realize that plenty of career-focused certificates and associate's degrees lead to satisfying careers that pay just as well as, and sometimes better than, careers that require a bachelor's degree. If detailed information on the broad array of higher education and career options were made available to them, students would have more incentive to work hard in high school and a better chance of achieving their dreams. This paper aims to identify three elements of the BA-for-all movement that are potentially harmful: (1) the idealization of the BA degree, which results in ignoring excellent options like an applied associate's degree in mechanical design technology, graphic communication technologies, dental hygiene, or computer networking; (2) the promise of college access, which results in high school students seeing their slightly older peers go off to college, but not seeing the trouble many have once on campus; and (3) the cultivation of stigma-free remediation, which results in many "college" students not even knowing that they are in remedial, noncredit courses. The authors discuss each of these issues and call for three simple remedies: (1) realizing that many good jobs do not require a BA; (2) fully informing students about their options; and (3) honestly telling them what it will take to succeed.

Yes, there is a college bubble, but who is going to determine who gets to go to college? Maybe there should be limited loans for liberal arts degrees and more loans for computer science and engineering?

If you choose medical technology, there are loans, for literature, not so many. And the competition for the loans will then make people think about careers as they choose a college. In my day, kids did that. You thought about what you wanted to be and chose college accordingly.

Not that you couldn't change your mind but you thought about college as the path to X,Y,Z job. You were expected to come out of college with a job and move out of your parent's house and be able to support yourself. Not well, but still support yourself.

Ren

College is the new high school. And college has always been somewhat of a pyramid scheme.

The major problem is the non-dischargability of the student loan debt, which is a real problem in the law school complex right now.

Go to a poor law school and you still get larded up with $150,000 in loans you can't get rid of.

And remember also that most of them will be burdened with student loan debt.


On average, people with degrees in classical liberal arts subjects or subjects like engineering or science or economics presumably end up with interesting higher-paying jobs. But I'm not sure how people with degrees in watered-down subjects fare.

It really bothers me to see colleges granting degrees to people without requiring them to spend a lot of time thinking carefully and analyzing stuff (e.g. complex math problems or analyzing a novel or historical event and writing a paper). People who haven't learned this skill aren't truly educated in a classical sense of the term. Plus, as studies have been showing, they aren't learning the skills required to analyze a situation and make sense of it. Here's an example of grade inflation trends and reduced learning outcomes in American colleges and universities.

A question Beckee and anyone else who's arguing in favor of encouraging everyone to go to college: what do you think of all the information that's been presented on this thread showing some very negative effects of pushing everyone to go to college?

You could poll the people who had gone to college and dropped out, but a study I read about ten years ago found that every college class you take has an impact on average income, whether or not you graduate.

So you're basing your stance on a single study that you read ten years ago that may or may not have been well-designed and that could be completely out of date now? What about all the new information that a number of people have been presenting here?

Since I am flying to another island to take the GRE today, and would like to replicate the results I got 16 years ago when I took it, I'm going to use an old teacher trick of asking a robust question and stepping back.

In a post-industrial economy (one in which manufacturing jobs have been leaving the country for lower wages abroad for decades), what alternatives do we have? What data do we have for the long-term benefits of those alternatives?

You didn't answer my question and obviously didn't even read the abstract that Bostonian posted. Is avoiding the issue an old teacher trick that you use?

The AFT article Bostonian links to is a good one. Thought-provoking, and a needed perspective, IMO.

My dad has an A&P license, no degree, and almost 20 years experience with certain airframes when he left the Army in the mid 70s. He was offered a top job at a major maintenance facility making 60K. That same position today pays almost 200K.

Here is what the average mechanic with an A&P license makes today without my dad's level of experience.

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Certification=Airframe_%26_Powerplant_%28A%26P%29_License/Salary

And with an A&P license, you can work on a lot of things, not just aircraft.

The same goes for people with a two year Cisco certificate from a local college. A number of high schools offer certification programs, too. These are just two examples. LPN and Hygenist programs are other options.

These two routes are more appropriate for kids with ACTS in the low 20s or below than sending them to college.

The dividing line between those who go to college and those who should not can be found in the first year chemistry/latin/physics/geometry classes in high school or the last year of middle school.

So, backing up. In today's dollars. A kid goes into the military today, gets his A&P working on helos, gets out after 20 years at age 38 with a 50K a year retirement. He then goes into maintenance making 80K a year. At age 40 he is making 130K a year in today's money and has no degree. That is more than most degreed IT salaries.

Another way to look at it - I have three guys in their mid 20s with cisco certs. No degree. They all make mid 50s. Compared to the poor souls who took out loans for masters, who is ahead? All three own homes and have new cars. Again, who is better off?

You do not need a degree to be a contributing member of society nor do you need a degree to be a highly productive employee.

The military was a good way to go, as long as you aren't on the front lines and get killed before that 50K retirement and 80K job after.

My father was WW2 vet and all those guys got free college degrees. I also know someone who medical school, care of the US Army. Spent his six years with them and left.

There are ways with the military but there is that risk of life...
Ren

Not reading the abstract isn't so much a teacher trick as a time management trick when you have something more important to do. It's also called "avoiding procrastination" or "prioritization". So, Val, can we safely assume you read the entire Pew Report instead of skimming it as I did?

These certifications we are talking about as an alternative to college are not "college"? I do believe they would be included in the Pew report as "some college". Perhaps I misunderstand.

There are always specialties that are more in demand than others. A good ultrasound tech can make $80K with an associate degree, but that doesn't mean that everybody with a two-degree is going to make $80K. They will, on average, make more than a high-school graduate, but are less likely to be satisfied with their jobs. Perhaps this is because, like me, they have unfulfilled aspirations.

You still haven't answered my question. Here it is again:

What do you think of all the information that's been presented on this thread showing some very negative effects of pushing everyone to go to college?

I know a radiology tech. He's quite happy with his job. It's stable and it's much improved over his labor job.

The really good non M.D. job (if you can't be a radiation oncologist) to get these days is nurse antesthetist.

So, what aspirations didn't you fufill?

I'm going to randomly interject here on a related point.

You know, now that I think about it, part of the problem is with the colleges themselves. They have been massively bulking up on administrative staff to the detriment of professors.

What else are you going to do when massive amounts of money is pouring in from the federal government? Why, you hire more staff and protect your bureaucratic turf!

Another point is science/tech itself might be topping out. The entire post-WWII/Cold War massive science boom has pretty much picked all the low hanging fruit. We may be reaching peak cheap energy, which could render this entire debate somewhat moot.

Well, I've looked at the links and the studies provided earlier in this thread, and I'm not finding a bunch of solid information on the negative effects of encouraging people to go to college. Of course, the articles I've read--if they are the ones you are talking about--have been heavily interpreted, watered-down, and filtered for a mass audience.

If you're talking about the anecdotal evidence of a very specific and self-selected group of people on this board, I take that evidence and weigh it against the data of the Pew report, which found that 86% of people with college degrees thought it was a worthwhile investment. This is a board devoted to issues surrounding gifted students, who have historically not enjoyed their schooling experiences, found fault with their teachers, and been bored in class, whether it was general education or a gifted class. My classes have a handful of gifted students. Some of them, not all, are the ones who can recites the speech they got from their parents on the same topic.

The data I have for our school's community show that it is slightly better educated than the rest of the state. Just under 30% of adults have college degrees. More than a third have "some college", and just over 10% did not finish high school. Now, not everybody in the community has children or sends them to public school, so you keep that in mind as you interpret the data.

I do think that many young people in this country make uninformed choices about higher education and careers, and that many of them make irrational decisions even when given good information. For example, when I was in school, I thought that employers would be impressed by my education, and that a college degree in economics would help me land a position that required a college degree in economics.

However, I graduated into the beginning of a recession. Having come from a working class background, I did not really understand what white collar bosses were looking for and how to sell the skills that I did have. Since my professors had pretty much gone straight through to the PhD, there was not much advice they could give me on other paths, even if they thought that was their job instead of mine to figure that out (with assistance from the career services office, of course). My --now late--advisor was a returned Peace Corps volunteer, and his advice was for me to realize that I couldn't change much of anything.

It was not until I was in my 30s and had graduated again, into another recession, with yet more student loans, that an admiral's widow told me what I have found again and again in data. This includes US Census data which is available to everybody on the internet but you may have to graph it yourself. People in their twenties do not make much money, so there is not a big difference in income between the ones who have degrees, and the ones who do not.

I often found, in those years, that my bosses had not gone to college. Instead they had worked for the same company for a few years and been promoted. They had knowledge of the workings of the company that was more directly applicable than the philosophy, anthropology and economics classes I had taken.

Nor have I based my assumptions on a single, outdated, ten year old study. The Pew report and census data also show that "some college" is beneficial to income. And I have a couple of decades of my own post-college experience, as well as contact with a wide variety of friends from high school and college. This also inform my understanding of how education impacts income, quality of life, and standard of living. And how who goes to college is often determined by factors that have nothing to do with ability.

If you've spent $50,000+ dollars and four years of your life doing something, there's a fairly strong response to see it as worthwhile, even when it wasn't.

I don't think that article in American Educator was watered down --- but I read it all instead of skimming it. I found it to be rich in data that was well-supported with 60 references. I actually think that article should be required reading in high schools and middle schools.

I also didn't think that the information about student loan debt was watered down. If anything, it carried a big punch: people in this country carry one trillion dollars of non-escapable student loan debt (more required reading for MS and HS students). This statistic scares me.

Honestly, and this is just my opinion, my impression from your posts is that you're coming at this issue from an ideological standpoint and have no interest in even considering the other side of the college-for-everyone story. By your own admission, you only skimmed a well-researched article. You were dismissive about "anecdotal evidence" of people on this board, but your posts in defense of college-for-all center heavily around your own experiences, which have been generalized twice to apply to others.

I'll close with a quote from the paper in American Educator:

According to the Pew study, 1 out of 6 college grads felt that college wasn't worth it. That is a substantial enough fraction for me to conclude that "College isn't for everyone, even everyone who can manage to go in the current environment." is a rational statement.

There is no reason for someone who loves a craft or a trade to feel that they should have to go to a traditional college, when an apprenticeship or technical certificate would serve them as well without creating a mountain of debt. I can think of three men in my immediate circle of friends who are all more than moderately gifted (SB-LM IQs range from 167-185) and who loved machines and mechanical work, and chose to be automotive mechanics. One turned down a full college scholarship to go into the military with a mechanic MOS. One chose to go through one of the most rigorous automotive technical programs in the country. The third went to college, got a BA in Psychology in two years, and then got out and went back to working on cars for a living. All eventually became ASE certified Master Mechanics. None of them regretted going into a trade. The one who went to college regretted acquiring debt to pay for knowledge that he could have acquired for free in the library in his spare time.

My father was a phenomenal cabinet maker. He learned his trade working beside his father and grandfather. He graduated high school with a Regent's diploma, and could have gone to college out of high school - but what would a Bachelor's degree have done for him, besides take him out of his craft for four years? He eventually did get an Associate's degree in his forties, when the technical school where he had been teaching cabinetry and woodworking for five years decided that all of their faculty had to have at least an AS. It was the most ridiculous exercise I had ever seen. He didn't learn a thing, and it just wasted his time and money.

If you are going to argue that "College is for everyone.", a single counterexample is sufficient to disprove that assertion.

Throwing more anecdotal evidence at this argument that college isn't for everyone-

I spent two years as an administrator at a vocational and technical charter high school. The charter graduated kids who had spent 4 years studying graphic design, culinary arts, childcare and child development, construction as well as the necessary high school graduation classes. Most of my students were foster kids, kids in the juvenile detention system or kids coming from very, very hard lives. Getting a job was their goal, not going to college. They simply wanted to have food and clothes and a useful skill they could put to work.

Our district shut the charter down because of the expense of running the school (tools are expensive) and because we did not promote college for all. We didn't teach a single AP class or even honors college prep classes. But you know what? Our graduation rate was 100% for 5 years and every one of our kids passed the required graduation exam in California.

I followed 15 kids that were sophomores and juniors afterward to find out what happened to them. Two graduated high school. The others all dropped out- some after transferring to the regular public school, some after going to the alternative/credit recovery school.

College for all failed those kids. And thousands more around the country who can't even imagine student loans. If they decided at 28 to go to community college or to go back to school, they were prepared educationally and mentally to make those decisions. We certainly never said "you can't go to college". But we did say "Hey, you're really great with your hands- did you know an apprentice electrician can make $60K?"

Wow. Very sad story. Sounds like it was a great school.

The kinds of kids we had didn't raise test scores Val, didn't earn any big fancy awards or get any positive attention. Putting them in one school was great for the kids, bad for the district. Who wants a reputation of being the school where everyone is "Basic" or below?

It was a real tragedy. I often think of the trickle down effect and how many lives could have been changed if we'd been able to stay open regardless of test scores and budgets. I'm pretty sure it costs more for the kids who went back into the system in some way than it did to educate them.

Great story. And very true.

The "college for all" mantra is creating a permanent underclass because these people cannot find that first job that leads to personal growth.

It also harms us as a nation by hollowing out our trades professions.

Of course, it does benefit the colleges and admins because they do not have to compete for money with the trade schools.

I suspect this is why the "hatchet job" was tried on for-profit schools - which backfired BTW.

About half of my IT staff has two year or less certs. IMHO, I could have 90% with just certs.

Front lines? LOL.

Being in the infantry today is like playing college football with the demands on your body. I don't know of anyone who does not have bad knees or backs after they reach 30.

Or the training accidents that kill and maim. Or the bad backs from humping the 120 pound rucks. My sister has permanent disability from her 6 years and my hearing and left hand are bad from my six years.

The US military runs the largest trade school program in the world. A kid does not have to join the Army to go to a trade school.

But, done right, they probably could not do better.

And I think a lot of really bright kids could be an officer after getting their BA/BS and learn how to lead. Six years in a post-grad leadership school, then get out and go into executive management.

The training I received in the Army was top notch, far better than anything I got when I was working on my MBA. Without that training, I would not be doing what I am today.

Eric Greitens was a Rhodes Scholar and became a Navy SEAL officer following his time at Oxford.

http://www.ericgreitens.com/

Beckee,
I think you've raised a lot of good questions throughout this discussion as pertains to perception and goals for students who may or may not eventually attend college. There is a big difference between talking about college in a classroom full of kids who already see college as a possibility and talking about college in a classroom full of kids who either have not considered it or who assume that they can�t have access. It occurs to me that more caution is needed in the classroom full of kids who are being raised with an expectation that they will go to college. Those are the kids who are likely to be defining success very narrowly and closing off other career options. Talking about college in a classroom full of kids who otherwise wouldn�t consider it is important. Because going to college is outside the norm for their community, they are less likely to close off other options in response, but may never consider college otherwise. That got me wondering about all of those statistics related to outcomes for college graduates and how they might apply differently in different subgroups of the population. I recall a friend of mine, who is African-American, talking about how she would never go to the grocery store in jeans and a tee-shirt or a pair of sweats because as an African-American woman she was treated with suspicion whenever she entered a store in something other than professional dress. In the context of this discussion, that got me wondering whether the lack of a college degree impacted African-Americans differently. In a culture that still has plenty of racism to go around, is the college degree necessary to acceptance in the job market in a different way than it is for white Americans? A quick search led me to:

this report

I have not read the whole chapter, but I looked to see if I could get an answer to that question and what I did find (in table 389) is that for those 25 and older, in the most recent year documented (2009), unemployment dipped below 10% ONLY in the segment of the African-American population with bachelor�s degrees. By contrast, within the same age demographic, unemployment for whites only climbed above 10% for whites without a high school diploma.
My point is not that everyone should go to college, but that we need to take into account that the impact of doing something or not doing something will play differently when combined with other significant societal factors. Just as it turns out that medical research done exclusively on males is often misleading when applied to females, discussions of college outcomes for a demographic that is disproportionately white can be misleading when applied to racial or ethnic subgroups.
Similar data
can be found here but it is less recent (2003)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/us/20school.html
Review of Census Data Reveals Information Tied to Schools
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
New York Times
August 19, 2011

...

But degrees mean higher earnings. The average annual pay for a worker with a bachelor�s degree was $58,613 in 2008, nearly double the $31,283 earned by workers with a high school diploma only, the bureau said.

<end of excerpt>

The first sentence above implies that the degree causes the entire differential, but I think it only explains PART of the differential.

Anyone else wish that these types of articles would include mean, median, and mode when they reference "average" earnings, test scores, and other outcomes?

Aculady: yes! Please, all the data!

DeeDee

Starting salaries for law students are pretty well researched.

It's a trimodal distribution:

20% - $160,000 per year
40% - $60,000 per year
40% - Starbucks Barista

I've just looked at an interesting graph of growth in student loans since 1999 --- which is an astounding 511%.

Here's a quote from the piece I read:

"Liz Dwyer notes that "the growth of student loan debt was twice as steep as the growth of mortgages and revolving home equity from 1999 to the peak of the housing bubble in 2008."

Yeesh. I remember that people were already complaining about them in the 90s. In the light of today's statistics, the debt burden then was mild.

I wonder what the ratio of loan to first year's salary is? And by degree?

You have written a few times about the increase in student loans, and other things being equal, young adults are better off without debt. However, the financial hit of college may be just as large for children of affluent parents who don't qualify for financial aid but graduate from college without any debt (because their parents pay). Some colleges cost as much as $55K/year, which is $220K for a B.A. My wife and I can and probably will pay these bills out of current earnings, but at what price point should parents say "here is the cash, you decide if college is worth it (or if the extra cost of a private college vs. the state university is worth it)"? I'm not going to give my children $55K no questions asked if they decide not to attend college, but what if they want to start a business instead of attending college? For my own kids should I play the role of Peter Thiel http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/99424/1.html ? While my kids are in middle and high school, I can arrange for them to learn some practical academic subjects, including math and statistics, science, and computer programming using online and other resources, so that they have the skills of many college graduates.

I think a good state school with that money in a trust until age 30 then released so they could buy a business would be something to consider.

One of my college roomates had this happen to him. He could either go to Dartmouth or his parents would keep the $100,000 for him and give it to him later. His mother died and he never got the $100,000.

In my case, my mother died and my father sold her inherited family assets to give to his new wife instead of paying for my sisters to go to school. His new wife decided they needed to take out loans. I didn't get any money for law school and got to take out loans.

It's good to establish trusts to avoid such scenarios.

A separate point is that if parents are willing to spend a fixed amount on the higher education of a child, that child should be allowed to attend a cheaper undergrad school (or graduate in three years because of A.P. credits) and to spend the remainder on professional school.

Then there's the scholarship issue.

I argue with my wife about this. I make the point that if our child was intellectually/academically capable of obtaining a full scholarship, but failed to work hard enough to get it, why should I pay for it? I

got a full scholarship and didn't cost my parents anything...why can't they get full scholarships, too?

The obvious answer is that the most selective universities, including the Ivies, Stanford, and MIT, only offer "need-based" scholarships.

My brother-in-law got a significant scholarship to Duke, so Duke provides merit scholarships. It's fairly selective.

Then you're talking scholarship to Duke vs. Penn, for example.

Now that I think about it some more, he got into Harvard, so it was a question of 3/4 schoarship to Duke vs. no $$$ for Harvard.

Most selective private colleges will not offer merit scholarships, but most public universities do. That was my experience years ago.

In the last few years in Texas this has led to the majority of National Merit and Class Valedictorians going to UT rather than the privates. I know I chose public college over private because of the cost - and after digging into the curriculum, I could see no difference.

The privates will offer "assistance" but much of it still leaves the student with large student loans. Which is nuts unless they will be 1/3 or less of your starting salary.

There are some significant differences between public and private universities. For example, a public school (especially a community college, and especially in California) will cancel a class if too few students enroll. Private colleges create very small classes deliberately and call them seminars. Alternatively, the breadth of study areas is usually much greater at a public university. But overcrowding in classes required for a major at public university means that some students can't enroll in courses they need and end up having to stay for an extra summer, semester or year (again, my knowledge pertains to California universities, but this problem is widespread here).

And then there's the cost. I went to a selective private college, and even knowing how wonderful my experience there was, I know that things have changed since then and that the costs have escalated like crazy. I wonder if they're worth it at this point. It probably depends on what you want to study.

It's probably North-Carolina specific.

I think Duke's goal is to actually attract some Valedictorian/National Merit students from North Carolina who would otherwise go into the UNC system for peanuts (or free).

Long article on education reform in NYC.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/06/the-failure-of-american-schools/8497/