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Who cuts a more forlorn figure than a poor kid who graduates from college facing crippling loan payments during the Great Recession of 2010?
Unlike too many of her peers, that student was prepared for college when she came out of high school. She made it through college despite the financial pressures that kept her friends from finishing or even starting a degree. Now, saddled with crushing debts, she seems as far as ever from the better life we all promised her.
You'd think more people would be willing to give her a hand. Instead, we have a system that encourages debt without doing much to raise the real value of grants to low-income students. What's worse, a growing number of people in the policy world seem to be concluding that college just isn't worth it for poor kids like her.
So What's The Problem with Student Lending? Here's how Arne Duncan describes the current state of student lending:
Every year, taxpayers subsidize student loans to the tune of $9 billion. Banks service these loans, collect the debt, keep the interest, and turn a profit. When borrowers default on their loans, taxpayers foot the bill, and banks still reap the interest.
Duncan and President Obama want to end the subsidies and issue loans directly through the Education Department. The move would save billions of dollars ...
An old idea is making a strong comeback in several states: Let 10th graders graduate from high school and enroll in community college if they're ready to do so. The idea of early graduation has a lot of merit, because it lets students choose a course that best suits their specific talents and aspirations.
But what about the opposite idea? What about late graduation?
No natural law dictates that high school should take four years. Some students can do it more quickly if they're ready to move on. But others, like recent immigrants who are still learning English, may need more than four years.
A high school principal once told me that she did what she could to keep some recent immigrants in her school as long as possible, even though her school's on-time graduation numbers suffered as a result. Some students arrive at her school at age 15 with no English and little or no formal schooling under their belts.
The larger point of any flexible graduation scheme is that the number of hours you spend warming a seat in your school should be less important than what you learn while you're there. As we weigh the benefits of early graduation, we shouldn't forget the needs of those students who need a little more time. ...
North Carolina’s Laurel Hill Elementary School is a model school. Its rural, diverse and high-poverty student population consistently exceeds state targets on standardized test scores, and the school has made AYP each year since 2003. It has also been recognized for its great working conditions.
But getting there wasn’t easy. In the early 2000s, one challenge stood out: The school failed to make AYP because of the performance of its students with disabilities (known in North Carolina as its “exceptional children”). Rather than throw up their hands at the daunting task of educating special education students, staff at Laurel Hill made lemonade out of lemons. They took the opportunity to study their school and its structure, revise its schedule and move to full inclusion. The result? A Blue Ribbon school that can confidently say it is meeting the needs of all its children. Principal Cindy Goodman recently told us about the school and its journey.
Public School Insights: How would you describe Laurel Hill Elementary?
Goodman: Laurel Hill is a pre-K through fifth grade community school. We have about 500 students and are located in an extremely rural community. We have a very nice facility, which is about 11 years old.
We have an outstanding staff that holds our children to very high standards for behavior, for academics…just high standards in general.
Public School Insights: What kind of population does the school serve?
Goodman: Our community, the little town of Laurel Hill, is located in Scotland County, North Carolina. The county currently has, and for a good while has had, the highest unemployment rate in the state. So it is a very poor area. Between ...
School segregation is back in the news, and it has me worried.
Early this month, UCLA's Civil Rights Project released a report (PDF) calling the charter school movement "a civil rights failure" for worsening segregation in U.S. schools. Charter supporters shot back, calling it perverse to fault charter schools in poor areas for enrolling mostly students of color who were hardly thriving before the advent of charters. One wise observer struck a more moderate pose, calling on all sides to "make racially isolated schools better, and do lots more to reduce that racial isolation in the first place."
I worry that racial isolation will mask inequities that can persist despite gains in test scores. Just take a look at what appears to be happening in New York City. The New York Daily News reports that the city's most prestigious high schools now enroll fewer black students than they did in 2002. The share of black students in some of these schools, like Bard and Eleanor Roosevelt, has plummeted to nearly half of what it once was. District officials counter that new "high-performing ...
"In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program is a world-class education." That sentence from the State of the Union address is bound to spark debate, and here's why:
We know too many well-educated people who are out of work. We can all name the well-educated people who helped plunge the nation into the deepest recession in many decades. Education alone guarantees nothing, and people in schools are right to get their backs up when others imply that schools manufacture poverty. There are just too many other culprits nowadays.
But we should face facts. High school dropouts barely stand a chance, even in good times. Children who can't clear even the lowest hurdles in state tests face a grim future if things don't turn around for them. Schools that lose more than half their students to the streets don't do much to promote social mobility in a ...
Ask South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer about free lunches for poor children, and here's what you'll get:
My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that.
He later implied that free lunch lowers test scores. (Hat tip to Alexander Russo.) ...
State test scores just don't tell us all we need to know about how our students are doing. Students' Success in college has to be a part of the picture.
Two new reports support this claim. A few weeks ago, a report by Education Sector found that states could improve their systems for grading high schools by taking college data into account. The success of a high school's graduates in college, it turns out, is more reliable than that same school's "Adequate Yearly Progress" in test scores is.
Less than two weeks ago, a report from the Center for Public Education (CPE) found a "silent achievement gap" in college preparation. Students from families with low incomes are much less likely than wealthy students to have the credentials they need--courses, grades and scores on entrance exams--to get into a good college. This gap isn't "silent" because it is in any way surprising. It is silent because ...
According to a new report (PDF), early childhood investments in Michigan have saved the state money over the long run. If that's true, the state's cutbacks to early childhood programs may be penny wise and pound foolish.
Here's how the blog Early Stories sums up the findings:
The report...found that investments the state has made in fully preparing young children for school has saved an estimated $1.15 billion over 25 years because the boost children got in pre-school programs decreased their need to repeat grades. The solid foundation also saved the state money by identifying disabilities in children early and cutting down on juvenile delinquency.
I'd hate to be in the shoes of Michigan lawmakers. They're facing huge shortfalls and have to make very painful decisions. But I hope more research into the return on every early childhood dollar can stave off further cuts in other states. James Heckman's work is a good place to start.
But there's a message here for education advocates as well. Budgets will stay lean for a good long while, so we'll have to make a very strong case for cost effectiveness. These days, pre-school is popular, but government spending isn't.
Photo: Simonxag, Wikimedia Commons. ...
"High expectations" has become a tagline in education circles. Repeat it enough times in enough contexts, and watch it lose most of its meaning. That's why I'm grateful for Carol Dweck's new article in Principal Leadership magazine. She reminds us that there is a good deal of science behind the slogan.
Dweck's argument, in a nutshell, is that mind-set matters. If you believe your intelligence is a fixed quantity, then you're not likely to learn very much. If you believe the same of your students, they're not likely to learn very much either. Even if you praise students for their intelligence, you're liable to stifle their motivation, feed their insecurities, and stunt their growth.
If, however, you praise them for their hard work and progress, then they're likely to stretch themselves and improve. They develop what Dweck calls the "growth mind-set." Her claims might just rescue the concept of self-esteem from disrepute.
The research she cites is compelling. Take, for example, the research on students of color:
Teaching a growth mind-set seems to decrease or even close achievement gaps. When Black and Latino students adopt a growth mind-set, their grades and achievement test scores look more similar ...
Recent debates about charter schools are shedding more heat than light. There's enough evidence out there now to keep both the critics and the boosters busy. But as most people know by now, arguments over whether charters are "good" or "bad" are a waste of time. The real question is whether we can create enough of the good ones to make a real dent in student achievement. And that's not at all clear.
Charter boosters got some more wind in their sails after Stanford's CREDO released a study of New York City charters. Their findings: students at charter schools make more academic progress than students at traditional public schools do. This study echoed earlier findings by another Stanford researcher, Carolyn Hoxby. The United Federation of Teachers countered that charters enroll fewer special education students and English language learners. (The City Education Department's data seem to bear this out.) Charter supporters responded in ...
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