Change the Equation's blog

Get a load of these college graduation rates. The New York Times reportsthat, in Texas, only about 61 percent of people who enroll in 4-year schools earn a degree within 8 years of starting. A mere 9 percent of Texans who enroll in community college graduate within four years. In Utah, the numbers are 45 percent and 20 percent.

The Times draws these data from a new report (PDF) by Complete College America, a non-profit that aims to raise the share of Americans with college degrees. The report is news, because it presents very new data, counting part-time and transfer students in its calculations. Federal data leave these students, who make up more than 40% of college enrollment, out of account.

The report doesn’t offer data for every state, because some didn’t cooperate. But it managed to get the data for 33 states, which is quite a feat.

The report's main conclusion: Time is the enemy. The longer it takes students to make their way to the finish line, the less likely they are to get there at all. Three of four college students juggle other commitments, like family or jobs. (The image of the college student as a 20 year old studying full time on a leafy campus somewhere is very out of date.) Those other commitments conspire with poor preparation in high school to keep students from graduating.

How do states and colleges turn things around? The report offers a number of recommendations. Among them: Reduce the amount of time students have to spend in class. Create predictable block schedules so that working students can plan their studies better. Allow some students to get their degrees faster by studying year round and in shorter academic terms. Embed remediation into the normal curriculum “so students don’t waste time before they start earning credits.” And give students better information on different programs costs, graduation rates and job placement track record.

The report does find some bright spots. As the Times reports, it “praises Tennessee's 27 Technology Centers, where the degree completion rate is 75 percent”:

Tech students, with an average age of 32, sign up for a program, not individual courses, and they come for seven hours a day, Monday through Friday, with classes ending by 3 p.m., allowing them to hold an evening job or care for their children after school. Instead of separate remedial courses, the centers have a required foundation course, in which each student learns skills needed for a program.”

Technical schools like Tennessee’s Technology Centers don’t really get the attention or respect they deserve, because they don't evoke traditional visions of college. If Complete College America succeeds, it might just change attitudes.

Keep this image in mind: In the pre-dawn hours, a constellation of lights shimmers in the dark courtyard of a junior high school in South Korea. What explains this curious sight? Students studying by flashlight as they wait for the school’s doors to open.

Tom Brokaw recalls seeing this vision out of his studio window every morning as he wrapped up his daily broadcasts from Seoul during the 1998 Olympic Games. As he writes in his first blog for NBC’s Education Nation, the image evokes “the challenges ahead for our country as we compete with the ambitions of Asia and emerging nations around the world.” Those South Korean kids have fire in their bellies.

Some who read this might think that nationality is destiny: Asians have the drive to succeed in the blood, which is where we Americans store the bad cholesterol and triglycerides we build up by scarfing slyders while watching Jersey Shore reruns. Even Jay Mathews, who is no apologist for teen slackers, once claimed that US kids could never match their Asian peers in math and science, because Asian kids are just wired to try hard and do well in those subjects—full stop.

Is that really true? Are U.S. students fated to maintain their mediocre to middling standing in international tests of math and science? Aren’t there other home-grown traditions we can draw from? What about all those stories of American ingenuity, inspiration and perspiration? The belief that American kids are constitutionally unable to step up their game seems, well, un-American.

In his blog post, Brokaw reminds us how much a country can change its own fortunes. Forty years before he saw those South Korean middle schoolers bent over their books in the dark, “their country was ravaged by a brutal war and their economy was somewhere in the middle of the 19^th century. Now they’re a world political and economic power.”

Take heart, and work hard. No nation is destined for mediocrity.

This story about a cache of very old report cards from a long defunct New York City trade school for mostly low-income, immigrant girls got Joanne Jacobs thinking:

One graduate started a business making stuffed animals and toys that’s still around.

Today, girls from low-income immigrant families are urged to go to college with little guidance on what they might do there to reach their real goal, a decent job. Most will start in remedial classes, give up on a degree and work low-skilled, low-paying jobs forever.

Jacobs's implicit question is: Are we wasting our effort pushing such girls into four-year colleges when vocational guidance might do them more good?

The usually astute Jacobs chooses an unfortunate example here. The New York City trade school taught girls trades like needlework, which required very little academic skill. It hardly needs saying that the world has changed, and that the kinds of jobs a trade school prepared you for almost 100 years ago have fled to other shores. Those that remain pay minimum wage. Even in the days of that trade school, the story of the graduate who started a business is likely the exception rather than the rule. Jobs that pay a decent wage and offer any prospect of a middle class life require more knowledge and skill than most students ever got through the old vocational model.

But Jacobs does have a point. Not every student needs to go to a four-year college. Other options, like technical school, can prepare young people for exciting high-tech careers and perhaps open the doors to a Bachelor's program down the line. Students who enroll in four-year schools unprepared for the rigors of college, or without any sense of what they can do with their lives, often end up with worse than nothing: no degree and crippling debt.

But does that mean we should stop counseling low-income immigrant kids to consider four-year colleges? In the days of that New York City trade school, the system was built to sort winners from losers, all too often on the basis of income and ethnicity or race. High-income, native born white kids went to college, and others went into basic trades. Now, a Bachelor's degree or more still pays off in lifetime wages and better employment opportunities.

We need to give all kids a better sense of what their options are for education after high school, and we need to make sure that they are prepared for all those options. We'll know we've been successful when student inclination, and not income, determines their course.

Are we letting our concern for low-achieving students distract us from the need to push and support the highest achievers? The authors of a new reportfrom the Thomas B Fordham Foundation think so. The report traces the progress of some 120,000 students and suggests that we are ignoring our high-fliers at our own risk, as they are critical to our nation's economic success. It implicitly raises a very uncomfortable question: Do we have to choose between equity and excellence?

So just how dire is the situation for our top performers? The report finds that, in math, almost half of the students who start in the top ten percent of students lose steam over the course of their K-12 careers. Yet it also finds that a slightly larger number of students ascends to the top than falls from it. So the overall share of high fliers actually grows slightly.* Academic mobility goes both ways.

Yet we do have cause for concern. Even though they don't fall far--seldom below the 70th percentile--those who fall from the heights could represent a lot of squandered talent. Those who climb into the top 10 percent didn't have to climb very far. Students who are below average, by contrast, very seldom make it to the top.

What's to blame for the fact that so many top students lose speed? The study's authors point to the No Child Left Behind law and other similar policies that focus on students at the bottom. Elsewhere, Rick Hesspoints to states that shifted funds from gifted to struggling students.

There is, as Catherine Gewertz notes, an uncomfortable tension here. Can we reconcile equity with excellence? The report notes with some concern that students at the bottom made faster gains in reading than students at the top did. In math, students at the bottom and top gained at about the same rate. So let's get this straight: The narrowing achievement gap in reading is bad news, but the persistent gap in math is good? Do we want some people to have far worse prospects than others? Do we want to maintain income inequality? (Bear in mind that low income students are by far most likely to be at the bottom of the heap).

The answer, of course is that we want equity and excellence. There will always be differences among students. That's natural. But we need to raise both the floor and the ceiling.

We can start by not settling for "proficiency" as defined by many states. Many set that bar so low that it obscures actual differences between the middle and the top. Even if we succeed in hoisting many struggling students just over the bar, we may not be cultivating enough truly strong performers. International tests of student performance reveal that even our top students are lagging behind students in many other countries.

As always in education, it's both/and: We have to close gaps and raise the floor. We have to attend to everyone. We don't have the luxury of choosing between rich and poor, star and straggler.

* Note: How can the "overall share" of students performing above the 90th percentile be very different from 10 percent, you ask? The study's authors based the 90th percentile on 2008 norms and did not change that bar to reflect the performance of different student cohorts.

Think of it as a triumph of citizen science. Online gamers just solved a critical puzzle that had bedeviled AIDS researchers for a decade.  By playing the game Foldit, they figured out the structure of an enzyme that helps the AIDS virus reproduce. Their discovery can help researchers devise new treatments for the disease. This work is buoying the spirits of gaming advocates, who insist that games can be much more than the massive time suck many people take them for. The success of Foldit could have real implications for the future of schooling.

So what did Foldit do? It created on on-line competition to "unfold" chains of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. To quote the AFP:

Figuring out the structure of proteins is vital for understanding the causes of many diseases and developing drugs to block them.

But a microscope gives only a flat image of what to the outsider looks like a plate of one-dimensional scrunched-up spaghetti. Pharmacologists, though, need a 3-D picture that "unfolds" the molecule and rotates it in order to reveal potential targets for drugs.

The experience of Foldit offers some insight into why games might have a role to play in schools. The online tools help people visualize the problem. The game requires teamwork and can prompt a faster solution by tapping "wisdom of crowds." And the competition makes it exciting.

Of course, we shouldn't let our enthusiasm run away with us. Derek Lowe provides some perspective: "This isn't a magic technique, and Foldit gamers are not going to rampage through the structural biology world solving all the extant problems any time soon." And yet, he concludes, Foldit's success is "nothing to sneeze at, either."

In education as in medicine, there are no miracle cures. Yet gaming offers some exciting ways forward.

How's this for a virtuous cycle? People with a strong foundation in science and technology create new innovations. Those new innovations spawn new industries. New industries create new jobs for people with a strong foundation in science and technology.

That, it seems, is what Facebook managed to do even in gloomy times. A company born in a Harvard dorm room "added at least 182,000 new jobs and contributed more than $12.19 billion in wages and benefits to the U.S. economy this year," according to a newwhite paper from the Robert H. Smith School of Business. A more aggressive estimate puts the total at "235,644 jobs, adding a value of $15.71 billion to the economy." That's some 100 times the "2000+" people Facebook itself employs.

How did Facebook do this? Through the "app economy," apparently. There are some 53,000 new jobs in software companies that create apps. Add to those jobs the new jobs created in "businesses that supply app developers, and in sectors that reap the benefits of increased household spending by app developers and suppliers from new app economy jobs." Ten years ago, no one knew what an "app" was. Who knows what other new industries could be around the corner.

Let's be happy Facebook happened here. We can thank our lucky stars for the young tech wizards and visionaries who created the Facebooks and Youtubes and Googles. We Americans tend to think that such invention is uniquely American, that it comes to us as naturally as the leaves to a tree.

It isn't. It doesn't. There is nothing that will keep other countries from eclipsing us if we continue to lag behind in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Even as we celebrate those 180,000 or more jobs, we should mourn for the millions of students who will be shut out of that market unless they get a much stronger foundation in STEM.

Facebook is a member of Change the Equation.

Here’s the cardinal rule of reform: Never let good ideas founder on lousy implementation. It’s bad enough that the ideas never reach their potential. It’s downright unconscionable that we generally blame the ideas themselves for our failure to put them into practice. If we’re not careful, the idea of common academic standards will meet this fate.

A new survey of school districts (PDF) finds that implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is going very slowly. Forty-four states have agreed to adopt the CCSS, which aim to do away with the bewildering hodgepodge of expectations in different states. (A student who is "proficient" in math in South Carolina might be below basic in Massachusetts.)

The survey finds that scarcely more than half of districts developed or bought "new curriculum materials" in 2010/11 or planned to do so in 2011/12. Fewer than half offered or plan to offer "professional development on the CCSS in a specific subject to teachers who teach that subject. Fewer than one in three assigned or plans to "assign resource teachers (or staff in similar positions) to assist teachers in integrating the CCSS in classroom instruction."

So why does this matter? Standards without curriculum, staff development, support for teachers or strong tests are just "wallpaper," as one noted school reformer puts it. They can look lovely in the background, but they don't really do much of anything.

Despite their sluggish start, most districts see the value of CCSS. Almost three in five agree that they're more rigorous than current state standards, while one in five disagree. Slightly fewer believe that, if well implemented, the CCSS will improve students' skills, while fewer than one in five disagree.

Why, then, would districts be off to such a slow start? Most point to poor guidance from states and funding concerns.

This should worry us. If the CCSS suffers from poor implementation, the very idea of common standards will be tainted. We'll hear in years to come that we "tried that" and it didn't work.

The path of school reform is littered with husks of good ideas that never fulfilled their promise. The more often that happens, the more inclined even school reformers are to declare that nothing works--and what a disaster that would be.

Consider these facts:

The College Board analyzed SAT results for this year and determinedthat 43 percent of test takers are ready for college. ACT reviewed the results of its test and found that about 25 percent of test takers are ready for college.

So what gives? Why such different results? Well, lots of reasons. Among them: The SAT and ACT don't test exactly the same students, nor do they test exactly the same subjects. The ACT tests English, reading, math and science, while the SAT tests reading, writing and math.

Yet the different results, which invariably make it into the papers, can be very bewildering for people who don't know the ins and outs of these tests. Is it a quarter of our students who are ready for college, or closer to half?

Americans often get mixed messages about the performance of US students. The National Assessment of Educational Progress paints a fairly grim picture of student performance, but many state tests suggest that 80 or 90 percent of students as proficient. (NAEP sets the bar high, and many states set it low.) Schools may receive high marks from state accountability systems and yet fail to meet federal targets for "Adequate Yearly Progress." (Sometimes, it works the other way around.)

All this should remind us that there is as much art as science involved in rating schools or measuring student progress. We should also keep in mind that the context of any test is very important. Who is being tested? What's on the test? How do the tests define proficiency?

News reports about schools seldom get in to these matters. But when it comes to measuring student performance, the devil is often in the details.

The Department of Commerce just released the thirdin a series of reports on jobs in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The new report offers yet more evidence that we have a problem: Black and Latino Americans are much less likely than white or Asian Americans to have a job in STEM and therefore to reap the benefits of some of the nation’s most satisfying and high paying careers. It can be easy to forget that this imbalance takes a real human toll.

The report also reveals a perverse dynamic that threatens to take a grave economic toll. We’re importing much of our STEM talent from abroad while squandering potential talent in a huge share of our population. About one in five people with STEM jobs was born outside the United States. For the better part of a century, this has been a great boon to the nation’s culture and economy. We can be thankful for this brain gain.

Yet we might have to brace ourselves for a brain drain down the road. The report notes that rising incomes abroad make it easier for foreign students to attend U.S. universities. Yet those same rising incomes can lure them back home again after they finish. Tom Friedman pointed to this problem more than six years ago, when he published The World Is Flat. It’s not clear that talented immigrants will forever find a better life in the United States.

There is so much human potential in this country. We're not tapping nearly enough of that potential.

Middle class schools are getting the shaft, suggests a new report from Third Way. Wealthy schools are, well, wealthy. The schools at the other end of the income scale get the most federal help. All those schools in the middle get less attention, the authors claim, and it shows. Their teachers earn less. They get less money per pupil. And their students’ performance is lackluster: Just over a third of their fourth graders is proficient in math. For 8^th graders, it’s just under a third. And about three in four don’t finish college before they’re 26.

Readers of the report may be surprised by what it means to be “middle class.” Third Way defines “middle class schools” as schools where between 25 and 75 percent of students can receive free or “reduced price” school lunches. Schools where so many students qualify for subsidized lunches don’t generally call up visions of two car garages and soccer moms. And yet more than half of our schools fall into that category.

If anything, that revelation should remind us that we have a very steep hill to climb. Even our “average” schools serve many students who have the deck stacked against them. Schools have to be a central front in the war on inequity. Unless we raise the performance of students living in poverty—wherever they happen to go to school—income gaps will grow, and the middle class (as we have commonly understood it) will shrink.

We certainly have to focus on schools where more than three in four students live in poverty. But we run a big risk if we define poverty down by paying less attention to all those schools in the middle