Is college too much to ask?

Charles Murray (of The Bell Curve fame): While half of our high school graduates march off to four-year colleges each year, only about 10% meet the intellectual benchmark suggested by College Board data - at least an 1180 on the SAT math and verbal tests - to master traditional college-level work. Murray contends that it’s cruel to steer kids to college when most lack the intellectual chops to handle it and will flounder. America holds a romanticized view of education, he says, and propagates a fairy tale, unsubstantiated by the hard truths of inborn abilities, that students are limited only by their ambition and will. Murray claims that the most schools can do is cause children who are intellectually below average - by definition about half of all kids - to be a little less below average. Even the best teachers under the best conditions cannot overcome the limits set by a child’s own cognitive abilities. “The 9-year-old who has trouble sounding out simple words and his classmate who is reading ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ for fun sit in the same classroom day after miserable day, the one so frustrated by tasks he cannot do and the other so bored that both are near tears.”

In countering Murray, Anthony Carnevale (director of Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce) attacked his major premise, “that there is something in each of us that is innate and fixed, that doesn’t change over time. … It is true that cognitive ability affects people’s prospect in life, but it’s also true that people’s prospects affect cognitive ability.” In looking at high-scoring first-graders across incomes, Carnevale says 75% of the more affluent kids will still test high in fifth grade, compared to only 45% of the poorer students. That gap is not created by some inherent deficit in the children, he says, but to the quality of the educational opportunities afforded the two groups.

http://www.ajc.com/search/content/opinion/stories/2008/12/15/learned.html

Carnevale (like most researchers looking at similar results) completely miss the point. They are confusing cause and effect. The largest factor influencing the facts that the affluent parents are affluent and the poor parents are poor is the cognitive ability of the parents, which IS hereditary. Therefore, the primary reason that financially disadvantaged students underperform is NOT financial; that is simply a side effect of the fact that they are below average on the cognitive ability scale.

WSJ Editorial on Alternative Certification

Like all unions, teachers unions have a vested interest in restricting the labor supply to reduce job competition. Traditional state certification rules help to limit the supply of "certified" teachers. But a new study suggests that such requirements also hinder student learning. Harvard researchers Paul Peterson and Daniel Nadler compared states that have genuine alternative certification with those that have it in name only. And they found that between 2003 and 2007 students in states with a real alternative pathway to teaching gained more on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal standardized test) than did students in other states.

Obama's Education Transition Advisor

Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University education professor and one of Obama’s advisors, will head the Education Department transition team that is tasked with drafting policy for the incoming administration. Darling-Hammond is a self-described advocate of “progressive” education, the methods of which she believes are “grounded in a deep sense of curricular intentions, arise from compelling questions, and include rigorous intellectual challenges such as critical thinking and problem solving across disciplines.” The best progressive educators “engage in a dialectic between the subject and the student” and in so doing, the student “is constantly moved to a broader and more thoughtful place in the curriculum.”

What can your humble servant possibly add to that towering monument of edu-speak?

88% of DC 8th-graders can't read

Well, not really, although that is the sensationalist headline that CNN used. If you actually watch the news clip the actual statistic is that only 12% of eighth graders are proficient at the eighth grade level per NAEP exams (and only 8% in math). Isn't that bad enough without a misleading headline?

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/09/07/bolduan.fixing.dc.schools.cnn

Fake Diploma Mill Degrees

http://spotlight.encarta.msn.com/Features/

One fact from the article jumped out at me.

"The number of fake doctorates sold each year is in the range of 50,000 to 60,000," states John Bear, author of "Bear's Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning." "The number of real Ph.D.s awarded is around 40,000."

Bear goes on to say "In America right now, more than half of all the Ph.D.s are fake." but that is not correct. I assume he meant more than half of all PhDs issued each year are fake.

Wall Street Looks Abroad

Senior executives at some of the largest U.S. corporations say stringent immigration policies are hurting New York's ability to compete with other financial centers. Investment bank officials say visa issues have forced them to move jobs to other countries. "New York's ability to compete with London, which has much more open immigration, or with the emerging financial capitals in Asia and the Middle East, depends on mobility of talent," said Kathryn Wylde, president of Partnership for New York City.

Source: NYT

Now even Wall Street claims it can't find talent, another chink in our educational armor.

Georgia Tech employee stole $350,000 in grant funds