Some of the News Fit to Print

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PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES JOIN TEAM COMPLETION
Given that they enroll more than a third of all undergraduates in the United States, public four-year colleges and universities will have to pick up their game in a big way if the country has any chance at all of meeting the ambitious goals that President Obama and his co-conspirators in the "completion agenda" have set for increasing postsecondary attainment. And on Tuesday, nearly 500 of them -- and their associations -- pledged to do just that, vowing to increase by 3.8 million the number of bachelor's degrees they award by 2025. They asserted, however, that doing so would be difficult if not impossible unless federal and state governments restore their historically strong financial support for the institutions. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
THE SLOW DEATH OF CALIFORNIA HIGHER EDUCATION
Andy Kroll writes in Mother Jones: California's public higher education system is dying a slow death. The promise of a cheap, quality education is slipping away for the working and middle classes, for immigrants, for the very people whom the University of California's creators held in mind when they began their grand experiment 144 years ago. And don't think the slow rot of public education is unique to California: that state's woes are the nation's.
STUDY: RACE NEUTRAL ADMISSIONS CAN WORK
As the Supreme Court revisits the use of race in college admissions next week, critics of affirmative action are hopeful the justices will roll back the practice. A new report out Wednesday offers a big reason for their optimism: evidence from at least some of the nine states that don’t use affirmative action that leading public universities can bring meaningful diversity to their campuses through race-neutral means. That conclusion is vigorously disputed by supporters of race-based affirmative action, including universities in states like California which cannot under state law factor race into admissions decisions. The AP article is in the Boston Globe.
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‘PARENT POWER’ FILM STIRS HOPE AMONG EDUCATION REFORMERS
The education reform film "Won't Back Down" opened last Friday to terrible reviews – and high hopes from activists who expect the movie to inspire parents everywhere to demand big changes in public schools. The drama stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a spirited mother who teams up with a passionate teacher to seize control of their failing neighborhood school, over the opposition of a self-serving teachers union. Reviewers called it trite and dull, but education reformers on both the left and right have hailed the film as a potential game-changer that could aid their fight to weaken teachers' unions and inject more competition into public education. The article is in The Christian Science Monitor.
FLIPPED CLASSROOMS COULD BRING AGE-BASED GROUPING TO AN END
Although flipped classroom ideas have been percolating in the education media for two years, Jeff Livingston, a senior vice president at McGraw-Hill, makes a new, interesting leap by suggesting that this kind of personalized approach to education could some day lead to the abolition of age-grouping in schools. Livingston explains that with learning growing increasingly individualized, schools could abandon the practice of sorting students into grades based on age in an attempt to put everyone with more or less equal ability into one learning environment, and instead sort directly by competence instead. The article is in EducationNews.org.
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DO KIDS REALLY LEARN FROM FAILURE? WHY CONVENTIONAL WISDOM MAY BE WRONG
Alfie Kohn writes in The Washington Post’s The Answer Sheet blog: When you hear about the limits of IQ these days, it’s usually in the context of a conservative narrative that emphasizes not altruism or empathy but something that sounds suspiciously like the Protestant work ethic.  More than smarts, we’re told, what kids need to succeed is old-fashioned grit and perseverance, self-discipline and will power. The goal is to make sure they’ll be able to resist temptation, override their unconstructive impulses, and put off doing what they enjoy in order to grind through whatever they’ve been told to do. Closely connected to this sensibility is the proposition that children benefit from plenty of bracing experiences with frustration and failure. Ostensibly this will motivate them to try even harder next time and prepare them for the rigors of the unforgiving Real World. However, it’s also said that children don’t get enough of these experiences because they’re overprotected by well-meaning but clueless adults who hover too close and catch them every time they stumble. This basic story, which has found favor with journalists as well as certain theorists and therapists, seems plausible on its face because some degree of failure is unavoidable and we obviously want our kids to be able to deal with it. On closer inspection, though, I think there are serious problems with both the descriptive and prescriptive claims we’re being asked to accept.
HOW IMPORTANT IS GRIT IN STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT?
Before she was a psychology professor, Angela Duckworth taught math in middle school and high school. She spent a lot of time thinking about something that might seem obvious: The students who tried hardest did the best, and the students who didn’t try very hard didn’t do very well. Duckworth wanted to know: What is the role of effort in a person’s success? Now Duckworth is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and her research focuses on a personality trait she calls “grit.” She defines grit as “sticking with things over the very long term until you master them.” In a paper, she writes that “the gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina.” Duckworth’s research suggests that when it comes to high achievement, grit may be as essential as intelligence. That’s a significant finding because for a long time, intelligence was considered the key to success. The article is in MindShift.
HOW CHILDREN SUCCEED: GRIT, CURIOSITY, AND THE HIDDEN POWER OF CHARACTER
Educator Elena Aguilar blogs in Edutopia: When I looked at the trends across our graduates in terms of who finished high school, who made it through college, and who extricated himself from dangerous situations, I saw patterns that all indicated high social and emotional intelligence. The success stories did not point to GPA or cognitive intelligence. But what do you do with that kind of "soft" data in this day and age? Along comes journalist Paul Tough with his new book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, which I'm telling you: order immediately. It is engrossing, easy to read, full of stories, relevant to teachers and parents, and epiphany-producing.  As I read, I kept feeling grateful to Paul Tough for having done this work -- gathering the stories of kids like Keitha Jones, the traumatized Southside Chicago teen who reminded me so much of a handful of kids I've taught; connecting Keitha's experience to research on neurochemistry and infant psychology, and situating these elements in both a socio-economic context and in the landscape of an education world focused on developing children's cognitive (and testable) skills. I kept having that feeling of -- I know what he's talking about, I've lived it for years as an urban educator -- but I've never seen anyone make such a clear argument for the fact that schools need to focus on developing students' social and emotional skills. I felt validated.

A MISSED OPPORTUNITY TO REFORM TEACHER EVALUATIONS
Attorney John Affeldt writes this commentary in EdSource: The Chicago teachers’ strike is the most recent example of how bloody the ideological debate over teacher evaluation has become in this country. Though not the only issue in Chicago, how to evaluate teachers and the role of standardized tests in that process has been at the core of the contentiousness in the Windy City. In California, we recently saw our own version of the teacher evaluation debate turn toxic with the demise of AB 5. AB 5 was not perfect, but for the community groups and advocates who supported it, its demise represents the loss of a much-needed reform of the state’s teacher evaluation system. In its stead, our public schools are left with the status quo of drive-by evaluations under the Stull Act, where teachers go years without meaningful feedback and rarely, if ever, have their professional development informed by the evaluation process. In figuring out a way forward, it’s worth examining the loudest arguments opposing AB 5 and whether and how to address them.

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COMMUNITY COLLEGES' CRISIS SLOWS STUDENTS' PROGRESS TO A CRAWL
The lives of some community college students have become a slow-motion academic crawl, sometimes forcing them to change their career paths and shrink their ambitions. It's a product of years of severe budget cuts and heavy demand in the two-year college system. The same situation has affected the Cal State and UC systems, but the impact has been most deeply felt in the 2.4-million-student community college system — the nation's largest. Since 2007, money from the state's general fund, which provides the bulk of the system's revenue, has decreased by more than a third, dropping from a peak of nearly $3.9 billion to about $2.6 billion last year. Without enough money, course offerings have dropped by almost a quarter since 2008. In a survey, 78 of the system's 112 colleges reported more than 472,300 students were on waiting lists for classes this fall semester — an average of about 7,150 per campus. The article is in the Los Angeles Times.
LET'S CALM DOWN ABOUT HIGHER EDUCATION
John T. Tierney writes in The Atlantic: Have you heard? Higher education in the United States is in serious decline; our colleges and universities are headed down the tubes. The problems, we're told, are manifold. Universities are self-serving bastions of managerial privilege, where multiple layers of deans feather their nests. Colleges are wasting money on nonsense, failing to educate students for the 21st century's demands. Kids themselves are co-conspirators, taking easy or trivial courses, avoiding study, and partying all the time. Graduates incur intolerable debt to secure a future filled with underemployment. Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? And those are just a few of the prominent strands of argument on the topic. What interests me about all this is that it is merely the latest iteration of a long-recurring narrative that American higher education is in crisis. American colleges and universities have inspired such concerns for centuries, and the same themes get revisited over and over. What accounts for the recurring anxiety and inflated rhetoric? No small part of the agitation is because we are not certain what it is people need to know to succeed individually, for our society to thrive, and our economy to be competitive. And we never have known.



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TWO IMPORTANT POINTS ABOUT TEST-BASED ACCOUNTABILITY
Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute, writes in The Washington Post’s The Answer Sheet blog: I have two points to make. The first is something that I think everyone knows: Educational outcomes, such as graduation and test scores, are signals of or proxies for the traits that lead to success in life, not the cause of that success. For example, it is well-documented that high school graduates earn more, on average, than non-graduates. Thus, one often hears arguments that increasing graduation rates will drastically improve students’ future prospects, and the performance of the economy overall. Well, not exactly.
PRICKLY DEBATE OVER CONTOURS OF MINNESOTA TEACHER EVALUATIONS
Across the nation, education officials are talking, at times contentiously, about how best to evaluate teachers. A new teacher evaluation system was a key point of dispute that led to the recent Chicago teachers' strike. Minnesota is in the early stages of putting together its new statewide teacher evaluation system with input from teachers, school administrators, lawmakers and other groups outside of education. The Minnesota Department of Education is working out the details with help from a 40-member working group. A major piece of the new teacher evaluation system under consideration is how student test scores should reflect upon a teacher's effectiveness. According to the new law, 35 percent of a teacher's evaluation must be based on how well students do. The piece is from Minnesota Public Radio News.
TEACHERS CLAIM NEW EVALUATION SYSTEM HAS FLAWS
Louisiana’s new method for evaluating public school teachers is flawed because some educators are getting failing marks even though their students are among the highest performing in the state, a Republican state lawmaker said. Starting with the current school year, half of a teacher’s job review will be linked to the growth of student performance, including how students fared on the standardized LEAP and iLEAP tests compared to previous years. LEAP is a skills test that fourth-graders have to pass for promotion. ILEAP is a test given to third-graders, but students do not have to pass it to advance. Gov. Bobby Jindal and other backers of the change said it will provide substantive checks on the performance of about 60,000 teachers, which they say will improve student achievement. Critics call the new evaluations flawed and likely to unfairly penalize top-flight educators. The article is in The Advocate.
WHY THE TEEN BRAIN IS DRAWN TO RISK
Adults have long reckoned with ways to protect adolescents from their own misjudgments. Only recently, however, have researchers really begun to understand how the teen brain is wired and that some of what appear to be teens’ senseless choices may result from biological tendencies that also prime their brains to learn and be flexible. Take teens’ perception of risk. It’s certainly different from that of adults, but not in the ways you’d expect. Research shows, for instance, that teens tend to wildly overestimate certain risks — of things like unprotected sex and drug use — not to lowball them as one would predict. So, it may be that teens’ notorious risk-taking behavior stems not from some immunity to known risks, but rather, as a new study now suggests, from their greater tolerance to uncertainty and ambiguity — that is, unknown risks. Oddly, teens’ information-processing style seems to rely on the uniquely human “rational” parts of the brain. They use quantitative reasoning and take about twice as long as adults do before responding, while adults immediately have a negative reaction to such risks, stemming intuitively from the insula, and almost automatically say no. The article is in Time.

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MY VIEW: THE FUTURE OF CREDENTIALS
Salman Khan writes in CNN’s Schools of Thought blog: When people talk about education, they are usually mixing together several ideas. The first is the idea of learning. The second is the idea of socialization. The third is the idea of credentialing - giving a piece of paper to someone that proves to the world that he or she knows what they know. These three different aspects of education are muddled together because today they are all performed by the same institutions - you go to college to learn, have a life experience and get a degree. Let’s try a simple thought experiment: What if we were to separate the teaching and credentialing roles of universities? What would happen if regardless of where (or whether) you went to college, you could take rigorous, internationally recognized assessments that measured your understanding and proficiency in various fields – anything from art history to software engineering.
OHIO COLLEGES ASKED TO DESIGN PLAN FOR PERFORMANCE FUNDING
The importance of performance metrics has been increasingly stressed in K-12 education, but for the most part, colleges and universities have kept it as an internal issue. Not any longer. Ohio governor John Kasich is now calling for leaders of 37 public colleges to get together and determine a funding formula that takes into account how effective each school is at translating state funds into well-prepared, highly-qualified college graduates. Kasich also stressed that by working together, colleges could discover ways to save money by isolating and removing redundancies in their academic programs. Governing.com reports that the Kasich’s idea to tie dollars to results isn’t new — even in higher education. States have been experimenting with performance-based funding as far back as the 1970s, although the recent attention paid to the concept in the sphere of K-12 education was bound to spill over onto institutions of higher learning sooner or later. The article is in Education News.

EVALUATING TEACHERS: CONTROVERSIAL BUT IMPORTANT
Stu Silberman writes in Education Week’s Public Engagement blog: The development of teacher evaluation systems is generating a lot of controversy around the country. Teachers in some states are very fearful of the effect these new systems might have on how they do their jobs or whether their employment will be at risk. Administrators are stressed about the time it takes to complete the process with each teacher. A leading Tennessee advocacy group, SCORE, prepared a study on that state's new system and recently released a report about the findings. I highly recommend the report to those of you who are considering, or might be in the future, creating a new teacher evaluation.
TEACHER EVALUATION SYSTEMS HOLD INHERENT TENSIONS
With No Child Left Behind waiver applications and related legislation ushering in new teacher evaluation systems in upwards of 20 states, an American Enterprise Institute report highlights four key tensions policymakers and educators must consider in refining such policies. The tensions include flexible vs. prescriptive policies and focusing on the lowest-performing teachers vs. all teachers. The article is in the Huffington Post.
EDUCATORS CRAFT OWN MATH E-BOOKS FOR COMMON CORE
Concerned about what they see as a dearth of instructional materials aligned with the Common Core State Standards in math, several educators in Utah, with support from the state office of education, are taking matters into their own hands. They're in the early stages of developing a set of e-textbooks for high school math that will be freely available. The article is in Education Week.
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COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENTS WANT CONNECTIONS
As community colleges work to improve student completion rates, it's not often that college leaders can learn the collective views of their students about what's working and not working for them at the institution. A new report, produced by WestEd and Public Agenda, uses focus group data to describe the perspectives of community college students — current students, completers, and non-completers — and their community college experiences.
MR. MOOC COMES TO WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Department of Education hosted an A-list of 150 higher education leaders and "disrupters" for a discussion Monday on how the federal government can encourage the more efficient production of college degrees and credentials. A recurring theme of the daylong meeting, most of which was off the record, was that policymaking on higher education is a balancing act of encouraging innovation and safeguarding investments. And while the federal government has plenty of influence, it has only the “blunt instruments” of financial aid programs to actually tell colleges what to do. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
 

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THE RISE OF THE TECH-POWERED TEACHER
Salman Kahn writes in Education Week: Best known for our collection of education videos, Khan Academy covers every subject from algebra to art history for grades K-12. A significant piece of Khan Academy, however, is the interactive exercises that allow students to practice math and get feedback at their own pace, while giving teachers data on student progress. Over the past few years, our team has had the privilege of working directly with some of the teachers who use Khan Academy with their students. As we talk with teachers and observe them in their classrooms, one theme becomes absolutely clear: More than anything, teachers want all of their students to reach their potential. Teachers have high expectations for their students, and they work hard to help them succeed. But teachers are in a tough position.
FOSTERING TECH TALENT IN SCHOOLS
Microsoft is using engineers from high-tech companies to get high school students hooked on computer science, so they go on to pursue careers in the field. In doing so, Microsoft is taking an unusual approach to tackling a shortage of computer science graduates — one of the most serious issues facing the technology industry, and a broader challenge for the nation’s economy. The article is in The New York Times.
REPORT: MOST MICHIGAN TEACHERS ACE REVIEWS
In Michigan, more than 99% of teachers from select districts earned scores placing them in the top two categories on evaluations, according to a report by Education Trust Midwest. Michigan passed laws in 2009 and 2011 that require new teacher reviews, including at least four categories of ratings and consideration of student-growth measures. The report is based on survey responses from 10 districts. The article is in Education Week.
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COMMUNITY COLLEGES GET $500 MILLION FOR JOB TRAINING
Community colleges will get $500 million in federal grants to fund job training. The Labor and Education departments will work together on the program, which will focus on  skills development and employment opportunities in high-demand through partnerships between training providers and local employers. In addition, Jobs for the Future will give $1.6 million each to five states to fund adult education and job training. The article is from the Hechinger Report.
THE COLLEGE RANKINGS RACKET
U.S. News cares a lot about how much money a school raises and how much it spends: on faculty; on small classes; on facilities; and so on. It cares about how selective the admissions process is. So universities that once served populations that were different from the Harvard or Yale student body now go after the same elite high school students with the highest SAT scores. And schools know that, if they want to get a better ranking, they need to spend money like mad — even though they will have to increase tuition that is already backbreaking. The article is in The New York Times.
CAN U.S. UNIVERSITIES STAY ON TOP?
Both India and China have intense national testing programs to find the brightest students for their elite universities. The competition, the preparation and the national anxiety about the outcomes make the SAT testing programs in the U.S. seem like the minor leagues. The stakes are higher in China and India. The "chosen ones"—those who rank in the top 1%—get their choice of university, putting them on a path to fast-track careers, higher incomes and all the benefits of an upper-middle-class life. The system doesn't work so well for the other 99%. The commentary is in the Wall Street Journal.
 

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STUDIES FIND PAYOFF IN ‘PERSONALIZNG’ ALGEBRA
While "personalization" has become a buzzword in education, it can be hard to determine what really makes a subject relevant to individual children in the classroom. An ongoing series of studies at Southern Methodist University suggests learning students' interests upfront and incorporating them into lessons can get struggling students to try harder and substantially improve their performance in algebra. The article is in Education Week.
A HOPEFUL FUTURE FOR THE NATIONAL BOARD
Under new executive director Ron Thorpe, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is rethinking its certification process and its role in education. Thorpe wants more teachers to earn board certification, which would also help his organization grow. Thorpe is a cheerleader for the Board and its value. But he’s also frank about where he thinks the organization has gone astray. For instance, he thinks it’s silly that, instead of submitting their required materials digitally, candidates for certification send them off in a blue box to a facility in San Antonio, Tex., for evaluation. The piece is in Kappan Magazine.
DEPRIVING A GENERATION OF EDUCATION
Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown writes in The Washington Post: Around the world, UNESCO figures show that 61 million children are not reaching even primary school. Despite the second Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015, Africa is sliding backward; if nothing changes, 2 million more African youths will be out of school by 2015.
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FACULTY NOT ALWAYS IN THE MOOC CONVERSATION
As colleges scramble to offer so-called massive open online courses, or MOOC's, faculty members have found themselves struggling to keep up with those plans and to make sure their views are heard. A dozen colleges, including Duke University and the California Institute of Technology, announced partnerships with the MOOC-platform company Coursera in July, and 17 more signed up this month. In some of those cases, faculty members had little input in the fast-moving negotiations, which took place over the summer. Many professors are now asking questions about what free online courses mean for their institution's future. The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
FEWER THAN HALF HIGH SCHOOL GRADS READY FOR COLLEGE
The SAT Report of College and Career Readiness, released by The College Board, the company that administers the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) used by colleges to assess student knowledge and potential, finds that less than 45% of current high school graduates have the skills necessary to succeed at college-level work. The information, drawn from the SAT results of students who graduated high school in 2012, shows that 43% of the students met the standards that correlate to a high likelihood of college success set out by the SAT College & Career Readiness Benchmark. The article is in EducationNews.org.



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DC LEADS THE WAY WITH TEST-BASED TEACHER EVALUATIONS
Although the ability to fire teachers for poor performance has been one of the most contentious issues defining the relationship between teachers unions and their local districts, in Washington, D.C. the mechanism to remove instructors who are preforming poorly has been in place since 2009. Usage of student achievement metrics in comprehensive teacher evaluation systems and therefore allow them to have an impact on hiring and firing decisions was one of the points of disagreement that led to the Chicago teacher strike which concluded last Tuesday. According to the Washington Post, since the system went into effect more than three years ago, it has led to the termination of nearly 400 teachers. Just last month, 98 Washington teachers were notified that they were being relieved of their jobs because their evaluation results were below the threshold required to maintain employment in the district. And far from the layoffs arousing a bad reaction from the union representing Washington teachers, the union leadership has actually expressed support for its use and also thanked district officials for softening the criteria used for employment decisions. The article is in Education News.
TOUGH: A STUDENT'S CHARACTER MATTERS MORE THAN INTELLIGENCE
Is a child's failure essential to achieving success? Author Paul Tough shares details from his latest book, "House Children Succeed," which aims to answer that question as well as whether school should teach character to their students. This video report is on NBC News’ Education Nation.

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ACADEMIC COACHING: SEEKING A WINNING STRATEGY
Academic coaching is becoming an integral formula for recruitment and retention, especially for minority and first-generation students who may need additional support to thrive in a collegiate setting.According to a recent study funded by Stanford University, InsideTrack reportedly has improved retention and graduation rates by 10 to 15 percent and is more cost-effective than previously studied interventions. The study was conducted by Eric Bettinger, an associate professor at Stanford’s School of Education. It compared the academic records of more than 13,500 students, half of whom had received coaching, and half of whom hadn’t. He found that freshmen in the coached group were 15 percent more likely to still be in school 18 to 24 months later. The article is in Diverse: Issues In Higher Education.
COLLEGES FOCUS ON LEARNING TO SUCCEED
The shift from high school to college can be a jolt. According to a 2009 survey from the National Center for Education Statistics, only 36 percent of students who started college at a four-year institution graduate within four years from that school. That drops to about 19 percent for students who graduated on-time from a two-year institution. So a growing number of colleges and universities have begun offering courses designed to help high-schoolers transition to college and stay on track to earning a degree. The article is in the Houston Chronicle.