Students in Residence
More Than a Meal Plan
Angela Jimenez for The New York Times
Whitman College, which anchors Princeton's new four-year residential college system, opens in August. At last, a dining hall for juniors and seniors (in mid-construction, left and right).
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By WINNIE HU
Published: July 29, 2007
THE Gothic towers and archways of Princeton’s newest dormitories were pieced together from 6,000 tons of hand-carved limestone and five types of bluestone, custom blended. Full-grown redwoods, cedars and firs were hoisted into place with cranes. Mahogany-framed leaded windows open the old-fashioned way, by hand-turned cranks, and the three-inch-thick oak doors were finished with teak oil rather than urethane.
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Angela Jimenez for The New York Times
Tiger Inn and other eating clubs on Prospect Avenue provide a social base for students.
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Angela Jimenez for The New York Times
A send-off party this spring for Butler College, which is being torn down and rebuilt with the amenities needed for a four-year residential college.
At a cost of some $100 million, the residential complex known collectively as Whitman College looks as if it has always been there, on a campus whose traditions run centuries deep. The luxury continues inside: duplex suites, semiprivate dining rooms, classrooms, library with computer carrels, digital photo lab, performing arts theater with dressing rooms, lounge with a piano and big-screen television.
Whitman College, opening on Aug. 17, will begin to accommodate Princeton’s first major expansion in more than three decades — 500 additional undergraduates by 2012, for a total of 5,200. But the university is not just building a new residential college; it is reinventing campus life.
Whitman will anchor a new four-year residential college system, including two reconfigured two-year colleges, Mathey and Butler, that is intended to give juniors and seniors an alternative to the private eating clubs that have been the dominant social force here for more than a century.
Since 1982, every incoming freshman has been randomly assigned to live in one of five colleges — Mathey, Butler, Rockefeller, Forbes and Wilson — where they are encouraged to dine, socialize and form a community under the guidance of faculty members. But come third year, they have to move, and many end up at the “junior slums,” as some upperclass dorms are known. In the absence of dining halls in those dorms, more than 70 percent of juniors and seniors join an eating club. The rest eat in the underclass colleges and at the student center under a university meal plan, or they become responsible for their own sustenance.
The clubs have evolved into much more than a place to take meals and can border on an obsession for those vying for entry to the older, more prestigious ones. Half of the 10 clubs, which shun publicity about their rituals and operations, still handpick new members through “bicker,” a multinight process said to be named for the bickering over which applicants to accept. Critics have long charged that the clubs reinforce socioeconomic divisions at a university whose population ranges from scions of the nation’s wealthiest families to students on full need-based scholarship. The clubs have also become known for underage drinking and noisy parties, in part because of the university’s longstanding ban on fraternities and sororities. (In recent years, though, Princeton students have formed several underground Greek organizations.)
Rob Biederman, the student government president, expects the four-year colleges to provide a continuous social experience that does not exist now, and an opportunity for students who forgo clubs. Mr. Biederman will move into Whitman for his senior year after unsuccessfully bickering at two selective clubs. He describes a “hunter-gatherer lifestyle” his junior year, alternating meals at the student center and local restaurants when he could not wangle guest passes to the clubs.
“If you’re in an eating club, you have a place to hang out during the day that isn’t your room, that isn’t the campus center,” he says. “But if you’re independent, you don’t.”
“I think if you asked people at the end of Princeton to rate how happy they were, people in eating clubs would be the happiest,” he says. “And I think people in four-year colleges will be just as happy as the people in eating clubs.”
Nancy Weiss Malkiel, dean of the college, says the new colleges were created not to compete with the eating clubs but as a response to students who wanted to remain in their colleges and were asking for a broader menu of social programs. “We’re enabling students to choose what they want to do,” she says. “And there are plenty of students to go around with the expansion.”
Still, the potential impact on the clubs has not gone unnoted.
Kyle Morgan, a Tiger Inn president who graduated in June, says he is concerned that students who might have joined clubs will be tempted away by the perks the university is dangling: “If it’s, ‘Hey, you can live in a 1,300-square-foot, five-room quad and have a photo lab right next door or you can live in Brown Hall and join an eating club,’ I don’t think you’re presenting students with equal options.”
PRINCETON’S eating clubs occupy stately mansions off campus, primarily along Prospect Avenue. They hire their own chefs and staff to run the buildings, which typically include a dining room, living room, library and — something Whitman will not have — a taproom. Members tend to stop by several times a day for meals, study breaks, movie nights and formal dances.
The first official eating club, Ivy, was formed in 1879 by a group of students who rented a stove and hired a cook, according to William K. Selden’s historical account, “Club Life at Princeton.” Mediocre food and sporadic operation of the campus dining hall had driven students to seek out local boardinghouses, and more than 20 clubs eventually formed, though failing finances and declining membership closed half. Women were admitted to the last all-male holdouts, after a decade of discrimination litigation, in 1991.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Princeton alumnus, offered a primer on the distinct character and social standing of the clubs in his 1920 novel, “This Side of Paradise.” He pegged the exclusive Ivy Club as “detached and breathlessly aristocratic” and Tiger Inn as “broad-shouldered and athletic, vitalized by an honest elaboration of prep-school standards” — both descriptions that could apply today. Fitzgerald was a member of the University Cottage Club, “an impressive mélange of brilliant adventurers and well-dressed philanderers.”
While not every eating club is easily defined, many have established identities that attract like-minded members. The Cap and Gown Club is said to attract athletes, though swimmers and rowers (“floaters and boaters”) favor Cloister Inn.
As a student at Princeton in the late 1980s, I was a member of Terrace, one of five clubs where students “sign in” to join (not everyone gets their first choice, however, because a lottery system is used). I liked its artsy, casual vibe — and the food. After subsisting on institutional fare for two years, I couldn’t get enough of the ethnic cuisine and homemade breads, and gained seven pounds in one semester. The current consensus is that the food at Terrace has slipped. The best meals are apparently at Charter, Colonial and Tower.
“You talk to people who are 60 or 70 years old, and the thing they remember most about being at Princeton is being in the eating clubs,” says Marco Fossati-Bellani, a president of Colonial Club who graduated in June. “It’s one of the things I’m going to take away from Princeton. I mean, I’m happy I took the classes I did, but everything I did that was fun came through Colonial pretty much.”
Eating-club fun of recent years has gotten out of hand.
Tiger Inn — often called Princeton’s “Animal House” — went dry for nearly two months in 2006 after reports of alcohol abuse and a sexual assault during “pickups” weekend, when, in the culmination to bicker, new members celebrate their initiation. That was the second report that school year of a sexual assault at the club.
“It had gotten to the point where people on Prospect were saying, ‘It’s T.I., what do you expect?’ ” says Hap Cooper, the club’s graduate board president. “That embarrassed them.”
Tiger Inn reopened its taps with new security and alcohol policies, including a buddy system to check on new members and in-house escorts to guide intoxicated students home. In addition, students who misbehave can have privileges restricted.
Some students say the changes have encouraged them to act more responsibly. “Definitely, people have grown up,” says Mr. Morgan of Tiger Inn.
WHILE several members describe bicker as a “G-rated” fraternity rush, with get-to-know-you activities like Taboo and Pictionary, costume wearing, relay races and the telling of funny stories about yourself, others describe a selection process that assesses candidates for wealth, family connections and physical attractiveness.
Woodrow Wilson, who as the university’s president had proposed eliminating eating clubs, declared that the lot of those students who were left out was “a little less than deplorable.” The current president, Shirley M. Tilghman, has criticized the selective clubs for choosing too “homogeneously” and not representing “the spirit of Princeton.” Students themselves have organized boycotts of the system at various times.
If administrators have had differences with the clubs, which are independent of the university, they have come to accept their importance.
Mark Burstein, Princeton’s executive vice president, says he met regularly with club officers and alumni to solicit input and secure their cooperation for the four-year residential colleges. “We see a strong connection to the eating clubs,” he says. “You can’t really separate out entities that are so essential to your student population. I would say that we are part of the same family.”
In the past, the university has covered the cost of a typical meal plan — $4,315 last year, as opposed to the average club fee of $6,300 — for juniors and seniors receiving financial aid. This fall, the university will increase that aid by $2,000. All juniors and seniors can also eat two free meals a week at any residential college. The eating clubs, in turn, have agreed to let about 100 residents of the colleges join a club at a reduced rate. The majority of students, though, will have to choose between the two.
If last spring’s room draw is any indication, there is no shortage of interest in the four-year colleges. Whitman filled quickly — 476 applied for the 204 upperclass spots, with the remaining rooms reserved for about 300 freshmen and sophomores. About 100 juniors and seniors will move into Mathey College in the fall.
Most of the modernist-style Butler is being torn down and rebuilt; the new dorms are to open in fall 2009 to house students for all four years. One evening this past spring, more than 100 past and present residents of Butler gathered to send off the squat, dark-brown buildings, widely considered the ugliest on campus, with a courtyard barbecue featuring drinks and live music. Handout T-shirts mocked the industrial-style ceilings and proclaimed “the end of an era.”
Meg Whitman, an alumna and chief executive officer of eBay, donated $30 million for the construction of Whitman College on a site that once held tennis courts. The eating clubs may find competition in the food stations, which will offer salad, pizza and grilled foods in place of the assembly-line cafeteria service of yore. The dining hall will have booths and smaller tables instead of large ones arranged in long rows. An area will be kept open for late-night snacks.
The colleges also have their own activities budgets and academic faculty advisers, who will be assigned to residents for all four years. The university’s writing program has been relocated to Whitman, where instructors will have offices and meet with students in seminar rooms on the ground floor.
Jennifer Schoppe, who just completed her freshman year in Mathey, says when she arrived at Princeton she assumed she would join an eating club. But Ms. Schoppe, an engineering major, says she is loath to give up the perks of the residential college, including informal lunches with professors and subsidized tickets to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
“Once you leave the college, it’s not available to you anymore,” she says. “It’s definitely made me think of the options a lot harder.”
Winnie Hu is an education reporter for The Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/education/edlife/princeton.html?ei=5070&en=4115dd4389a7049c&ex=1186632000&pagewanted=all
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Hook-Up Culture Gets Moral Shake-Up
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Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Rising Elitism at CUNY
Higher education and the poor
The City University of New York
Jan 19th 2006
From The Economist print edition
FOR America's colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn have to be made by the end of December, so a university's popularity is put to an objective standard: how many people want to attend. One of the more unlikely offices to have been flooded with mail is that of the City University of New York (CUNY), a public college that lacks, among other things, a famous sports team, bucolic campuses and raucous parties (it doesn't even have dorms), and, until recently, academic credibility.…
Unfinished. Look up on Nexis
The City University of New York
Jan 19th 2006
From The Economist print edition
FOR America's colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn have to be made by the end of December, so a university's popularity is put to an objective standard: how many people want to attend. One of the more unlikely offices to have been flooded with mail is that of the City University of New York (CUNY), a public college that lacks, among other things, a famous sports team, bucolic campuses and raucous parties (it doesn't even have dorms), and, until recently, academic credibility.…
Unfinished. Look up on Nexis
AAMC on Current Status of the Higher Education Act
Reauthorization of the Higher Education Act
Related Resources
Compilation of Federal Education Laws (House Education and Workforce Committee)
May 26, 2004, ACE Letter to the House on Reauthorization
H.R. 609
S. 1614
AAMC Documents
AAMC Letter on Accreditation Provisions of HEA Reauthorization (PDF, 3 pages - 49KB)
AAMC Letter to the Senate on HEA Reauthorization (PDF, 3 pages - 47KB)
Medical Educational Costs and Student Debt: A Working Group Report to the AAMC Governance (PDF, 17 pages - 1.52MB)
This page contains documents in Portable Document Format (PDF). The Adobe Acrobat® Reader® is required to view PDF documents. Download Acrobat® Reader®.
Current Status
Current authority for the Higher Education Act (HEA) expired on Sept. 30, 2003, however several extensions have been enacted, making no policy changes but allowing uninterrupted administration of the programs. President Bush Sept. 30 signed the "Second Higher Education Extension Act of 2006" (P.L. 109-238) to extend temporarily HEA through June 30, 2007. The House and Senate education committees are expected to resume consideration of HEA reauthorization in 2007.
The President Feb. 8, 2006, signed the "Deficit Reduction Act of 2005" (S. 1932, P.L. 109-171), which includes many of the student loan provisions from HEA reauthorization (H.R. 609, S. 1614). The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the changes to the higher education programs in P.L. 109-171 will generate a net $11.9 billion in savings between 2006 and 2010 and $29.0 billion in savings between 2006 and 2015. While the law's provisions mandate savings of over $20 billion between 2006 and 2010 from higher education programs, $9 billion is recycled back into student aid. A majority of the savings are generated through increases to borrowers' interest rates and changes to lender-yield formulas.
Of particular interest to medical schools, the new law:
extends authority for Family Federal Education Loan Program (FFELP) through 2012;
expands the loan eligibility for the federal Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students (PLUS) loan program to include graduate and professional students;
increases annual unsubsidized Stafford loan limits for graduate and professional students from $10,000 to $12,000;
increases the interest rate for a PLUS loan in the FFELP from 7.9 percent to 8.5 percent;
creates a parallel fee structure for the FFELP and Direct Loan (DL) programs, incrementally reducing net borrower loan fees in both the FFELP and DL over the next 5 years to 1 percent in 2010;
prevents reconsolidation of previously consolidated loans under both the FFELP and DL programs unless they are being consolidated with additional student loans;
repeals spousal and in-school consolidation of FFELP and DL loans;
limits "School as Lender" programs to Stafford Loans to graduate and professional students;
allows the one time cost of obtaining the first professional credentials to be included in total cost of attendance for students enrolled in a program requiring professional licensure or certification;
disqualifies students from eligibility for FFELP or DL student aid if they have committed a crime involving fraud in obtaining Title IV funds and have not fully repaid those funds; and
limits the suspension of eligibility for students convicted of drug offenses to those that occurred during the period the student received FFELP or DL student aid.
The President June 15 signed a FY 2006 Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill (H.R. 4939), repealing the single-holder rule. The single-holder rule restricted consolidation of loans under the Federal Family Educational Loan Program (FFELP) by prohibiting borrowers whose FFELP loans are currently with a single lender from consolidating under different lenders.
Congressional Activity
The House March 30 approved the College Access and Opportunity Act of 2005 (H.R. 609), which reauthorizes HEA through 2012. The night before its consideration on the House Floor, House Committee on Education and the Workforce Chair Howard "Buck" McKeon struck two provisions from the bill. One provision would have revised the formula used to allocate funds for the government's campus-based student-aid programs. The other would have allowed the Department of Education's Office of the Inspector General to audit the financial records of institutions that repeatedly raise their tuition by more than twice the rate of inflation.
H.R. 609 includes two studies on medical education. A provision introduced by Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), an orthopedic surgeon, requires the "Secretary of Education to conduct a study of the indebtedness of medical students, asking the question of whether the cost of medical school is becoming prohibitive and whether the best and brightest individuals are not choosing careers in medicine because of the potential debt burden." Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.), a heart surgeon, and Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) sponsored a second study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to evaluate and determine reasons for the decline in the number of medical school graduates entering residency programs lasting more than 5 years.
Rep. Boustany and Rep. Andrews also sponsored an approved amendment that adds "medical specialists" to a new loan forgiveness program for service in "areas of national need." Eligible medical residents must be enrolled in a residency program that requires more than 5 years of graduate medical education training and has fewer US medical school graduate applicants than the total number of training and fellowship positions available. Participants in the loan forgiveness program will be eligible for $5,000 each year of training after their 5th year.
H.R. 609 also requires that accrediting associations or agencies enforce standards that "consider the stated missions of institutions of higher education, including religious missions."
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions unanimously approved without amendment its version of HEA reauthorization Sept. 8, 2005. It is unclear whether this bill will be considered for a Senate vote this year.
AAMC Activity
With the high debt levels of medical school graduates, many medical students come up against the annual and even the aggregate limits for federal Stafford education loans. Because the current limits have not been raised in over a decade, the Association believes that these limits should be adjusted to have at least kept up with the cost of inflation. Additionally, the unique nature of residency training makes repayment of these high debt burdens difficult in the years immediately following medical school graduation. Specifically, the AAMC advocacy agenda for the HEA reauthorization has been to support increasing the annual limit on subsidized Stafford loans from the current $8,500 to at least $12,000, and to extend the Economic Hardship Deferment throughout the initial residency period for individuals that continue to qualify. The Association also supports including all school-certified educational debt in the calculation used to determine eligibility for the deferment.
The AAMC sent a comment letter Nov 15, 2005, to the House and Senate Education Committees expressing concerns regarding the accreditation provisions of the HEA reauthorization bills (H.R. 609, S. 1614). The letter focuses on several changes in accrediting bodies' reporting requirements and recommends that public disclosure of sensitive findings remain at the discretion of the institution. Additionally, the AAMC recommends the deletion of provisions that require accrediting associations or agencies to enforce standards based on the institution's mission.
Contact
Matthew Shick, Legislative Analyst
AAMC Office of Governmental Relations
mshick@aamc.org
(202) 828-0525
Related Resources
Compilation of Federal Education Laws (House Education and Workforce Committee)
May 26, 2004, ACE Letter to the House on Reauthorization
H.R. 609
S. 1614
AAMC Documents
AAMC Letter on Accreditation Provisions of HEA Reauthorization (PDF, 3 pages - 49KB)
AAMC Letter to the Senate on HEA Reauthorization (PDF, 3 pages - 47KB)
Medical Educational Costs and Student Debt: A Working Group Report to the AAMC Governance (PDF, 17 pages - 1.52MB)
This page contains documents in Portable Document Format (PDF). The Adobe Acrobat® Reader® is required to view PDF documents. Download Acrobat® Reader®.
Current Status
Current authority for the Higher Education Act (HEA) expired on Sept. 30, 2003, however several extensions have been enacted, making no policy changes but allowing uninterrupted administration of the programs. President Bush Sept. 30 signed the "Second Higher Education Extension Act of 2006" (P.L. 109-238) to extend temporarily HEA through June 30, 2007. The House and Senate education committees are expected to resume consideration of HEA reauthorization in 2007.
The President Feb. 8, 2006, signed the "Deficit Reduction Act of 2005" (S. 1932, P.L. 109-171), which includes many of the student loan provisions from HEA reauthorization (H.R. 609, S. 1614). The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the changes to the higher education programs in P.L. 109-171 will generate a net $11.9 billion in savings between 2006 and 2010 and $29.0 billion in savings between 2006 and 2015. While the law's provisions mandate savings of over $20 billion between 2006 and 2010 from higher education programs, $9 billion is recycled back into student aid. A majority of the savings are generated through increases to borrowers' interest rates and changes to lender-yield formulas.
Of particular interest to medical schools, the new law:
extends authority for Family Federal Education Loan Program (FFELP) through 2012;
expands the loan eligibility for the federal Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students (PLUS) loan program to include graduate and professional students;
increases annual unsubsidized Stafford loan limits for graduate and professional students from $10,000 to $12,000;
increases the interest rate for a PLUS loan in the FFELP from 7.9 percent to 8.5 percent;
creates a parallel fee structure for the FFELP and Direct Loan (DL) programs, incrementally reducing net borrower loan fees in both the FFELP and DL over the next 5 years to 1 percent in 2010;
prevents reconsolidation of previously consolidated loans under both the FFELP and DL programs unless they are being consolidated with additional student loans;
repeals spousal and in-school consolidation of FFELP and DL loans;
limits "School as Lender" programs to Stafford Loans to graduate and professional students;
allows the one time cost of obtaining the first professional credentials to be included in total cost of attendance for students enrolled in a program requiring professional licensure or certification;
disqualifies students from eligibility for FFELP or DL student aid if they have committed a crime involving fraud in obtaining Title IV funds and have not fully repaid those funds; and
limits the suspension of eligibility for students convicted of drug offenses to those that occurred during the period the student received FFELP or DL student aid.
The President June 15 signed a FY 2006 Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill (H.R. 4939), repealing the single-holder rule. The single-holder rule restricted consolidation of loans under the Federal Family Educational Loan Program (FFELP) by prohibiting borrowers whose FFELP loans are currently with a single lender from consolidating under different lenders.
Congressional Activity
The House March 30 approved the College Access and Opportunity Act of 2005 (H.R. 609), which reauthorizes HEA through 2012. The night before its consideration on the House Floor, House Committee on Education and the Workforce Chair Howard "Buck" McKeon struck two provisions from the bill. One provision would have revised the formula used to allocate funds for the government's campus-based student-aid programs. The other would have allowed the Department of Education's Office of the Inspector General to audit the financial records of institutions that repeatedly raise their tuition by more than twice the rate of inflation.
H.R. 609 includes two studies on medical education. A provision introduced by Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), an orthopedic surgeon, requires the "Secretary of Education to conduct a study of the indebtedness of medical students, asking the question of whether the cost of medical school is becoming prohibitive and whether the best and brightest individuals are not choosing careers in medicine because of the potential debt burden." Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.), a heart surgeon, and Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) sponsored a second study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to evaluate and determine reasons for the decline in the number of medical school graduates entering residency programs lasting more than 5 years.
Rep. Boustany and Rep. Andrews also sponsored an approved amendment that adds "medical specialists" to a new loan forgiveness program for service in "areas of national need." Eligible medical residents must be enrolled in a residency program that requires more than 5 years of graduate medical education training and has fewer US medical school graduate applicants than the total number of training and fellowship positions available. Participants in the loan forgiveness program will be eligible for $5,000 each year of training after their 5th year.
H.R. 609 also requires that accrediting associations or agencies enforce standards that "consider the stated missions of institutions of higher education, including religious missions."
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions unanimously approved without amendment its version of HEA reauthorization Sept. 8, 2005. It is unclear whether this bill will be considered for a Senate vote this year.
AAMC Activity
With the high debt levels of medical school graduates, many medical students come up against the annual and even the aggregate limits for federal Stafford education loans. Because the current limits have not been raised in over a decade, the Association believes that these limits should be adjusted to have at least kept up with the cost of inflation. Additionally, the unique nature of residency training makes repayment of these high debt burdens difficult in the years immediately following medical school graduation. Specifically, the AAMC advocacy agenda for the HEA reauthorization has been to support increasing the annual limit on subsidized Stafford loans from the current $8,500 to at least $12,000, and to extend the Economic Hardship Deferment throughout the initial residency period for individuals that continue to qualify. The Association also supports including all school-certified educational debt in the calculation used to determine eligibility for the deferment.
The AAMC sent a comment letter Nov 15, 2005, to the House and Senate Education Committees expressing concerns regarding the accreditation provisions of the HEA reauthorization bills (H.R. 609, S. 1614). The letter focuses on several changes in accrediting bodies' reporting requirements and recommends that public disclosure of sensitive findings remain at the discretion of the institution. Additionally, the AAMC recommends the deletion of provisions that require accrediting associations or agencies to enforce standards based on the institution's mission.
Contact
Matthew Shick, Legislative Analyst
AAMC Office of Governmental Relations
mshick@aamc.org
(202) 828-0525
Heritage Foundation Education Articles
ISSUES > Education
Education
Build a new vision for America's 21st century schools in which every child has access to excellence in a competitive market of public, private, charter, and home schools.
Research for the last 12 months
9 Items for the last 12 months | View: All Papers200720062005200420032002200120001999199819971996199519941993199219911990198919881987198519841983198219811979
20 February 2007
A Better Answer for Education: Reviving State and Local Policymaking Authority
By the Honorable John Cornyn and the Honorable Jim DeMint
Heritage Lecture #994
The A-PLUS Act of 2007 would restore federalism to public education by allowing states flexibility in spending their federal education dollars while still requiring an accountability system to provide parents and taxpayers necessary information. The states should have the option to stay under the No Child Left Behind regime or accomplish the same goals in a different way.
16 February 2007
Utah's Revolutionary New School Voucher Program
By Dan Lips and Evan Feinberg
WebMemo #1362
Utah has created the most comprehensive school choice program in the nation.
16 January 2007
Halving Student Loan Interest Rates Is Unaffordable and Ineffective
By Brian M. Riedl
WebMemo #1308
Reducing interest rates on student loans does not increase college access for prospective students, but merely subsidizes loan repayments after college.
12 January 2007
The Real Costs of Federal Aid to Higher Education
By Richard Vedder, Ph.D.
Heritage Lecture #984
New federal spending on student aid is unlikely to improve college access. The increase in access in higher education in America largely came before massive federal involvement in student financial aid programs.
6 December 2006
The Charter State Option: Charting a Course Toward Federalism in Education
By Dan Lips, Evan Feinberg, and Jennifer A. Marshall
Backgrounder #1987
Congress should embrace a charter state option, allowing states to choose between the status quo and an alternative contractual arrangement with the federal government. Under a charter contract, elected state officials would have broad authority to consolidate and refocus their federal funds on state initiatives in exchange for monitoring and reporting academic progress.
18 September 2006
School Choice: 2006 Progress Report
By Dan Lips and Evan Feinberg
Backgrounder #1970
School choice programs have been shown to increase parental satisfaction, improve academic achievement of participating children, and improve public school performance through competition. Already in 2006, eight states have enacted new initiatives or expanded existing private school choice programs. State and federal policymakers should implement student-centered reforms to give all parents the ability to direct their children's education.
1 September 2006
Are Public or Private Schools Doing Better? How the NCES Study Is Being Misinterpreted
By Shanea Watkins
Backgrounder #1968
A recent study published by the National Center for Education Statistics is being used in an effort to discredit private school voucher programs, but its results should be interpreted cautiously. Studies based on better methods show that students who attend private schools through a voucher program experience greater achievement gains than do their public school counterparts.
30 May 2006
America's Opportunity Scholarships for Kids: School Choice for Students in Underperforming Public Schools
By Dan Lips
Backgrounder #1939
The Bush Administration's America's Opportunity Scholarships for Kids initiative would provide real school choice to American parents. In addition to helping children trapped in failing schools, it would provide a model for how federal, state, and local policymakers can provide better educational opportunities for America's disadvantaged students through student-centered reforms.
18 April 2006
School Choice and Supplemental Services: Administration Slow to
http://www.heritage.org/research/education/
Education
Build a new vision for America's 21st century schools in which every child has access to excellence in a competitive market of public, private, charter, and home schools.
Research for the last 12 months
9 Items for the last 12 months | View: All Papers200720062005200420032002200120001999199819971996199519941993199219911990198919881987198519841983198219811979
20 February 2007
A Better Answer for Education: Reviving State and Local Policymaking Authority
By the Honorable John Cornyn and the Honorable Jim DeMint
Heritage Lecture #994
The A-PLUS Act of 2007 would restore federalism to public education by allowing states flexibility in spending their federal education dollars while still requiring an accountability system to provide parents and taxpayers necessary information. The states should have the option to stay under the No Child Left Behind regime or accomplish the same goals in a different way.
16 February 2007
Utah's Revolutionary New School Voucher Program
By Dan Lips and Evan Feinberg
WebMemo #1362
Utah has created the most comprehensive school choice program in the nation.
16 January 2007
Halving Student Loan Interest Rates Is Unaffordable and Ineffective
By Brian M. Riedl
WebMemo #1308
Reducing interest rates on student loans does not increase college access for prospective students, but merely subsidizes loan repayments after college.
12 January 2007
The Real Costs of Federal Aid to Higher Education
By Richard Vedder, Ph.D.
Heritage Lecture #984
New federal spending on student aid is unlikely to improve college access. The increase in access in higher education in America largely came before massive federal involvement in student financial aid programs.
6 December 2006
The Charter State Option: Charting a Course Toward Federalism in Education
By Dan Lips, Evan Feinberg, and Jennifer A. Marshall
Backgrounder #1987
Congress should embrace a charter state option, allowing states to choose between the status quo and an alternative contractual arrangement with the federal government. Under a charter contract, elected state officials would have broad authority to consolidate and refocus their federal funds on state initiatives in exchange for monitoring and reporting academic progress.
18 September 2006
School Choice: 2006 Progress Report
By Dan Lips and Evan Feinberg
Backgrounder #1970
School choice programs have been shown to increase parental satisfaction, improve academic achievement of participating children, and improve public school performance through competition. Already in 2006, eight states have enacted new initiatives or expanded existing private school choice programs. State and federal policymakers should implement student-centered reforms to give all parents the ability to direct their children's education.
1 September 2006
Are Public or Private Schools Doing Better? How the NCES Study Is Being Misinterpreted
By Shanea Watkins
Backgrounder #1968
A recent study published by the National Center for Education Statistics is being used in an effort to discredit private school voucher programs, but its results should be interpreted cautiously. Studies based on better methods show that students who attend private schools through a voucher program experience greater achievement gains than do their public school counterparts.
30 May 2006
America's Opportunity Scholarships for Kids: School Choice for Students in Underperforming Public Schools
By Dan Lips
Backgrounder #1939
The Bush Administration's America's Opportunity Scholarships for Kids initiative would provide real school choice to American parents. In addition to helping children trapped in failing schools, it would provide a model for how federal, state, and local policymakers can provide better educational opportunities for America's disadvantaged students through student-centered reforms.
18 April 2006
School Choice and Supplemental Services: Administration Slow to
http://www.heritage.org/research/education/
Sunday, March 4, 2007
What if Meritocratic = Asian?
Little Asia on the Hill
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
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By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: January 7, 2007
WHEN Jonathan Hu was going to high school in suburban Southern California, he rarely heard anyone speaking Chinese. But striding through campus on his way to class at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Hu hears Mandarin all the time, in plazas, cafeterias, classrooms, study halls, dorms and fast-food outlets. It is part of the soundtrack at this iconic university, along with Cantonese, English, Spanish and, of course, the perpetual jackhammers from the perpetual construction projects spurred by the perpetual fund drives.
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Too Many? Not Enough? Some say Asian-Americans are being denied spots at top colleges to keep their numbers in check (Asians make up 5 percent of the population). Click for percentages of Asian undergraduates at selected colleges.
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“Here, many people speak Chinese as their primary language,” says Mr. Hu, a sophomore. “It’s nice. You really feel like you don’t stand out.”
Today, he is iPod-free, a rare condition on campus, taking in the early winter sun at the dour concrete plaza of the Free Speech Movement Cafe, named for the protests led by Mario Savio in 1964, when the administration tried to muzzle political activity. “Free speech marks us off from the stones and stars,” reads a Savio quote on the cafe wall, “just below the angels.”
There are now mostly small protests, against the new chain stores invading Telegraph Avenue, just outside the campus entrance, and to save the old oak trees scheduled for removal so the football stadium can be renovated. The biggest buzz on Telegraph one week was the grand opening of a chain restaurant — the new Chipotle’s, which drew a crowd of students eager to get in. The scent of patchouli oil and reefer is long gone; the street is posted as a drug-free zone.
And at least on this morning, there is very little speech of any kind inside the Free Speech Cafe; almost without exception, students are face-planted in their laptops, silently downloading class notes, music, messages. It could be the library but for the line for lattes. On mornings like this, the public university beneath the towering campanile seems like a small, industrious city of über-students in flops.
I ask Mr. Hu what it’s like to be on a campus that is overwhelmingly Asian — what it’s like to be of the demographic moment. This fall and last, the number of Asian freshmen at Berkeley has been at a record high, about 46 percent. The overall undergraduate population is 41 percent Asian. On this golden campus, where a creek runs through a redwood grove, there are residence halls with Asian themes; good dim sum is never more than a five-minute walk away; heaping, spicy bowls of pho are served up in the Bear’s Lair cafeteria; and numerous social clubs are linked by common ancestry to countries far across the Pacific.
Mr. Hu shrugs, saying there is a fair amount of “selective self-racial segregation,” which is not unusual at a university this size: about 24,000 undergraduates. “The different ethnic groups don’t really interact that much,” he says. “There’s definitely a sense of sticking with your community.” But, he quickly adds, “People of my generation don’t look at race as that big of a deal. People here, the freshmen and sophomores, they’re pretty much like your average American teenagers.”
Spend a few days at Berkeley, on the classically manicured slope overlooking San Francisco Bay and the distant Pacific, and soon enough the sound of foreign languages becomes less distinct. This is a global campus in a global age. And more than any time in its history, it looks toward the setting sun for its identity.
The revolution at Berkeley is a quiet one, a slow turning of the forces of immigration and demographics. What is troubling to some is that the big public school on the hill certainly does not look like the ethnic face of California, which is 12 percent Asian, more than twice the national average. But it is the new face of the state’s vaunted public university system. Asians make up the largest single ethnic group, 37 percent, at its nine undergraduate campuses.
The oft-cited goal of a public university is to be a microcosm — in this case, of the nation’s most populous, most demographically dynamic state — and to enrich the educational experience with a variety of cultures, economic backgrounds and viewpoints.
But 10 years after California passed Proposition 209, voting to eliminate racial preferences in the public sector, university administrators find such balance harder to attain. At the same time, affirmative action is being challenged on a number of new fronts, in court and at state ballot boxes. And elite colleges have recently come under attack for practicing it — specifically, for bypassing highly credentialed Asian applicants in favor of students of color with less stellar test scores and grades.
In California, the rise of the Asian campus, of the strict meritocracy, has come at the expense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics. This year, in a class of 4809, there are only 100 black freshmen at the University of California at Los Angeles — the lowest number in 33 years. At Berkeley, 3.6 percent of freshmen are black, barely half the statewide proportion. (In 1997, just before the full force of Proposition 209 went into effect, the proportion of black freshmen matched the state population, 7 percent.) The percentage of Hispanic freshmen at Berkeley (11 percent) is not even a third of the state proportion (35 percent). White freshmen (29 percent) are also below the state average (44 percent).
This is in part because getting into Berkeley — U.S. News & World Report’s top-ranked public university — has never been more daunting. There were 41,750 applicants for this year’s freshman class of 4,157. Nearly half had a weighted grade point average of 4.0 or better (weighted for advanced courses). There is even grumbling from “the old Blues” — older alumni named for the school color — “who complain because their kids can’t get in,” says Gregg Thomson, director of the Office of Student Research.
Mr. Hu applied to a lot of colleges, but Berkeley felt right for him from the start. “It’s the intellectual atmosphere — this place is intense.”
Mr. Hu says he was pressured by a professor to go into something like medicine or engineering. “It’s a stereotype, but a lot of Asians who come here just study engineering and the sciences,” he says. “I was never interested in that.”
But as the only son of professionals born in China, Mr. Hu fits the profile of Asians at Berkeley in at least one way: they are predominantly first-generation American. About 95 percent of Asian freshmen come from a family in which one or both parents were born outside the United States.
He dashes off to class, and I wander through the serene setting of Memorial Glade, in the center of campus, and then loop over to Sproul Plaza, the beating heart of the university, where dozens of tables are set up by clubs representing every conceivable ethnic group. Out of nowhere, an a cappella group, mostly Asian men, appears and starts singing a Beach Boys song. Yes, tradition still matters in California.
ACROSS the United States, at elite private and public universities, Asian enrollment is near an all-time high. Asian-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the population but typically make up 10 to 30 percent of students at the nation’s best colleges:in 2005, the last year with across-the-board numbers, Asians made up 24 percent of the undergraduate population at Carnegie Mellon and at Stanford, 27 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14 percent at Yale and 13 percent at Princeton.
And according to advocates of race-neutral admissions policies, those numbers should be even higher.
Asians have become the “new Jews,” in the phrase of Daniel Golden, whose recent book, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates,” is a polemic against university admissions policies. Mr. Golden, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is referring to evidence that, in the first half of the 20th century, Ivy League schools limited the number of Jewish students despite their outstanding academic records to maintain the primacy of upper-class Protestants. Today, he writes, “Asian-Americans are the odd group out, lacking racial preferences enjoyed by other minorities and the advantages of wealth and lineage mostly accrued by upper-class whites. Asians are typecast in college admissions offices as quasi-robots programmed by their parents to ace math and science.”
As if to illustrate the point, a study released in October by the Center for Equal Opportunity, an advocacy group opposing race-conscious admissions, showed that in 2005 Asian-Americans were admitted to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, at a much lower rate (54 percent) than black applicants (71 percent) and Hispanic applicants (79 percent) — despite median SAT scores that were 140 points higher than Hispanics and 240 points higher than blacks.
To force the issue on a legal level, a freshman at Yale filed a complaint in the fall with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, contending he was denied admission to Princeton because he is Asian. The student, Jian Li, the son of Chinese immigrants in Livingston, N.J., had a perfect SAT score and near-perfect grades, including numerous Advanced Placement courses.
“This is just a very, very egregious system,” Mr. Li told me. “Asians are held to different standards simply because of their race.”
To back his claim, he cites a 2005 study by Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung, both of Princeton, which concludes that if elite universities were to disregard race, Asians would fill nearly four of five spots that now go to blacks or Hispanics. Affirmative action has a neutral effect on the number of whites admitted, Mr. Li is arguing, but it raises the bar for Asians. The way Princeton selects its entering class, Mr. Li wrote in his complaint, “seems to be a calculated move by a historically white institution to protect its racial identity while at the same time maintaining a facade of progressivism.”
Private institutions can commit to affirmative action, even with state bans, but federal money could be revoked if they are found to be discriminating. Mr. Li is seeking suspension of federal financial assistance to Princeton. “I’m not seeking anything personally,” he says. “I’m happy at Yale. But I grew up thinking that in America race should not matter.”
Admissions officials have long denied that they apply quotas. Nonetheless, race is important “to ensure a diverse student body,” says Cass Cliatt, a Princeton spokeswoman. But, she adds, “Looking at the merits of race is not the same as the opposite” — discrimination.
Elite colleges like Princeton review the “total package,” in her words, looking at special talents, extracurricular interests and socioeconomics — factors like whether the applicant is the first in the family to go to college or was raised by a single mother. “There’s no set formula or standard for how we evaluate students,” she says. High grades and test scores would seem to be merely a baseline. “We turned away approximately half of applicants with maximum scores on the SAT, all three sections,” Ms. Cliatt says of the class Mr. Li would have joined.
In the last two months, the nation has seen a number of new challenges to racial engineering in schools. In November, the United States Supreme Court heard a case questioning the legality of using race in assigning students to public schools in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. Voters are also sending a message, having thrown out racial preferences in Michigan in November, following a lead taken by California, Texas, Florida and Washington. Last month, Ward Connerly, the architect of Proposition 209, announced his next potential targets for a ballot initiative, including Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Nebraska.
When I ask the chancellor at Berkeley, Robert J. Birgeneau, if there is a perfect demographic recipe on this campus that likes to think of itself as the world’s finest public university — Harvard on the Hill — he demurs.
“We are a meritocracy,” he says. And — by law, he adds — the campus is supposed to be that way. If Asians made up, say, 70 percent of the campus, he insists, there would still be no attempt to reduce their numbers.
Asian enrollment at his campus actually began to ramp up well before affirmative action was banned.
Historically, Asians have faced discrimination, with exclusion laws in the 1800s that kept them from voting, owning property or legally immigrating. Many were run out of West Coast towns by mobs. But by the 1970s and ’80s, with a change in immigration laws, a surge in Asian arrivals began to change the complexion of California, and it was soon reflected in an overrepresentation at its top universities.
In the late 1980s, administrators appeared to be limiting Asian-American admissions, prompting a federal investigation. The result was an apology by the chancellor at the time, and a vow that there would be no cap on Asian enrollment.
University administrators and teachers use anguished words to describe what has happened since.
“I’ve heard from Latinos and blacks that Asians should not be considered a minority at all,” says Elaine Kim, a professor of Asian-American studies at Berkeley. “What happened after they got rid of affirmative action has been a disaster — for blacks and Latinos. And for Asians it’s been a disaster because some people think the campus has become all-Asian.”
The diminishing number of African-Americans on campus is a consistent topic of discussion among black students. Some say they feel isolated, without a sense of community. “You really do feel like you stand out,” says Armilla Staley, a second-year law student. In her freshman year, she was one of only nine African-Americans in a class of 265. “I’m almost always the only black person in my class,” says Ms. Staley, who favors a return to some form of affirmative action.
“Quite frankly, when you walk around campus, it’s overwhelmingly Asian,” she says. “I don’t feel any tension between Asians and blacks, but I don’t really identify with the Asian community as a minority either.”
Walter Robinson, the director of undergraduate admissions, who is African-American, has the same impression. “The problem is that because we’re so few, we get absorbed among the masses,” he says.
Chancellor Birgeneau says he finds the low proportion of blacks and Hispanics appalling, and two years into his tenure, he has not found a remedy. To broaden the pool, the U.C. system promises to admit the top 4 percent at each high school in the state and uses “comprehensive review” — considering an applicant’s less quantifiable attributes. But the net results for a campus like Berkeley are disappointing. His university, Dr. Birgeneau says, loses talented black applicants to private universities like Stanford, where African-American enrollment was 10 percent last year — nearly three times that at Berkeley.
“I just don’t believe that in a state with three million African-Americans there is not a single engineering student for the state’s premier public university,” says the chancellor, who has called for reinstating racial preferences.
One leading critic of bringing affirmative action back to Berkeley is David A. Hollinger, chairman of its history department and author of “Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism.” He supported racial preferences before Proposition 209, but is no longer so sure. “You could argue that the campus is more diverse now,” because Asians comprise so many different cultures, says Dr. Hollinger. A little more than half of Asian freshmen at Berkeley are Chinese, the largest group, followed by Koreans, East-Indian/Pakistani, Filipino and Japanese.
He believes that Latinos are underrepresented because many come from poor agrarian families with little access to the good schools that could prepare them for the rigors of Berkeley. He points out that, on the other hand, many of the Korean students on campus are sons and daughters of parents with college degrees. In any event, he says, it is not the university’s job to fix the problems that California’s public schools produce.
Dr. Birgeneau agrees on at least one point: “I think we’re now at the point where the category of Asian is not very useful. Koreans are different from people from Sri Lanka and they’re different than Japanese. And many Chinese-Americans are a lot like Caucasians in some of their values and areas of interest.”
IF Berkeley is now a pure meritocracy, what does that say about the future of great American universities in the post-affirmative action age? Are we headed toward a day when all elite colleges will look something like Berkeley: relatively wealthy whites (about 60 percent of white freshmen’s families make $100,000 or more) and a large Asian plurality and everyone else underrepresented? Is that the inevitable result of color-blind admissions?
Eric Liu, author of “The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker” and a domestic policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton, is troubled by the assertion that the high Asian makeup of elite campuses reflects a post-racial age where merit prevails.
“I really challenge this idea of a pure meritocracy,” says Mr. Liu, who runs mentoring programs that grew out of his book “Guiding Lights: How to Mentor and Find Life’s Purpose.” Until all students — from rural outposts to impoverished urban settings — are given equal access to the Advanced Placement classes that have proved to be a ticket to the best colleges, then the idea of pure meritocracy is bunk, he says. “They’re measuring in a fair way the results of an unfair system.”
He also says Asian-Americans are tired of having to live up to — or defend — “that tired old warhorse of the model minority.”
“We shouldn’t be calling these studying habits that help so many kids get into good schools ‘Asian values,’ ” says Mr. Liu, himself a product of Yale College and Harvard Law School. “These are values that used to be called Jewish values or Anglo-Saxon work-ethic values. The bottom line message from the family is the same: work hard, defer gratification, share sacrifice and focus on the big goal.”
Hazel R. Markus lectures on this very subject as a professor of psychology at Stanford and co-director of its Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her studies have found that Asian students do approach academics differently. Whether educated in the United States or abroad, she says, they see professors as authority figures to be listened to, not challenged in the back-and-forth Socratic tradition. “You hear some teachers say that the Asian kids get great grades but just sit there and don’t participate,” she says. “Talking and thinking are not the same thing. Being a student to some Asians means that it’s not your place to question, and that flapping your gums all day is not the best thing.”
One study at the institute looked at Asian-American students in lab courses, and found they did better solving problems alone and without conversations with other students. “This can make for some big problems,” she says, like misunderstandings between classmates. “But people are afraid to talk about these differences. And one of the fantastic opportunities of going to a Stanford or Berkeley is to learn something about other cultures, so we should be talking about it.”
As for the rise in Asian enrollment, the reason “isn’t a mystery,” Dr. Markus says. “This needs to come out and we shouldn’t hide it,” she says. “In Asian families, the No. 1 job of a child is to be a student. Being educated — that’s the most honorable thing you can do.”
BERKELEY is “Asian heaven,” as one student puts it. “When I went back East my Asian friends were like, ‘Wow, you go to Berkeley — that must be great,’ ” says Tera Nakata, who just graduated and now works in the residence halls.
You need only go to colleges in, say, the Midwest to appreciate the Asian feel of this campus. But Berkeley is freighted with the baggage of stereotypes — that it is boring socially, full of science nerds, a hard place to make friends.
“About half the students at this school spend their entire career in the library,” one person wrote in a posting on vault.com, a popular job and college search Web site.
Another wrote: “Everyone who is white joins the Greek system and everyone who isn’t joins a ‘theme house’ or is a member of a club related to race.”
There is some truth to the image, students acknowledge, but it does not do justice to the bigger experience at Berkeley. “You have the ability to stay with people who are like you and not get out of your comfort zone,” says Ms. Nakata. “But I learned a lot by mixing it up. I lived in a dorm with a lot of different races, and we would have these deep conversations all the time about race and our feelings of where we belong and where we came from.” But she also says that the “celebrate diversity aspect” of Berkeley doesn’t go deep. “We want to respect everyone’s differences, but we don’t mix socially.”
Near the end of my stay at Berkeley I met a senior, Jonathan Lee, the son of a Taiwanese father and a mother from Hong Kong. He grew up well east of Los Angeles, in the New America sprawl of fast-growing Riverside County, where his father owned a restaurant. He went to a high school where he was a minority.
“When I was in high school,” he says, “there was this notion that you’re Chinese, you must be really good in math.” But now Mr. Lee is likely to become a schoolteacher, much to the chagrin of his parents, “who don’t think it will be very lucrative.”
The story of Jon Lee’s journey at Berkeley is compelling. As president of the Asian-American Association, he has tried to dispel stereotypes of “the Dragon Lady seductress or the idea that everybody plays the piano.” His closest friends are in the club. It may seem that he has become more insular, that he has found his tribe. But Mr. Lee says he has been trying to lead other Asian students out of the university bubble. Once a week, they go into a mostly black and Hispanic middle school in the Bay Area to mentor students.
For the last five semesters, Mr. Lee has worked with one student. “I take him out for dim sum, or to Chinatown, or just talk about college and what it’s like at Cal,” he says. “We talk about race and we talk about everything. And he’s taught me a lot.”
The mentoring program came about not because of prodding by well-meaning advisers, teachers or student groups. It came about because Mr. Lee looked around at the new America and found that it looked very different from Berkeley. And much as he loves Berkeley, he knew that if he wanted to learn enough to teach, he needed to get off campus.
Timothy Egan reports for The Times from the West Coast. He won a 2006 National Book Award for “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/education/edlife/07asian.html?ei=5070&en=2100b567250576d4&ex=1173243600&pagewanted=all
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
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By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: January 7, 2007
WHEN Jonathan Hu was going to high school in suburban Southern California, he rarely heard anyone speaking Chinese. But striding through campus on his way to class at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Hu hears Mandarin all the time, in plazas, cafeterias, classrooms, study halls, dorms and fast-food outlets. It is part of the soundtrack at this iconic university, along with Cantonese, English, Spanish and, of course, the perpetual jackhammers from the perpetual construction projects spurred by the perpetual fund drives.
Skip to next paragraph
Too Many? Not Enough? Some say Asian-Americans are being denied spots at top colleges to keep their numbers in check (Asians make up 5 percent of the population). Click for percentages of Asian undergraduates at selected colleges.
Multimedia
Slide Show
Berkeley Bubble
East Meets West
Education Life
Go to Special Section »
“Here, many people speak Chinese as their primary language,” says Mr. Hu, a sophomore. “It’s nice. You really feel like you don’t stand out.”
Today, he is iPod-free, a rare condition on campus, taking in the early winter sun at the dour concrete plaza of the Free Speech Movement Cafe, named for the protests led by Mario Savio in 1964, when the administration tried to muzzle political activity. “Free speech marks us off from the stones and stars,” reads a Savio quote on the cafe wall, “just below the angels.”
There are now mostly small protests, against the new chain stores invading Telegraph Avenue, just outside the campus entrance, and to save the old oak trees scheduled for removal so the football stadium can be renovated. The biggest buzz on Telegraph one week was the grand opening of a chain restaurant — the new Chipotle’s, which drew a crowd of students eager to get in. The scent of patchouli oil and reefer is long gone; the street is posted as a drug-free zone.
And at least on this morning, there is very little speech of any kind inside the Free Speech Cafe; almost without exception, students are face-planted in their laptops, silently downloading class notes, music, messages. It could be the library but for the line for lattes. On mornings like this, the public university beneath the towering campanile seems like a small, industrious city of über-students in flops.
I ask Mr. Hu what it’s like to be on a campus that is overwhelmingly Asian — what it’s like to be of the demographic moment. This fall and last, the number of Asian freshmen at Berkeley has been at a record high, about 46 percent. The overall undergraduate population is 41 percent Asian. On this golden campus, where a creek runs through a redwood grove, there are residence halls with Asian themes; good dim sum is never more than a five-minute walk away; heaping, spicy bowls of pho are served up in the Bear’s Lair cafeteria; and numerous social clubs are linked by common ancestry to countries far across the Pacific.
Mr. Hu shrugs, saying there is a fair amount of “selective self-racial segregation,” which is not unusual at a university this size: about 24,000 undergraduates. “The different ethnic groups don’t really interact that much,” he says. “There’s definitely a sense of sticking with your community.” But, he quickly adds, “People of my generation don’t look at race as that big of a deal. People here, the freshmen and sophomores, they’re pretty much like your average American teenagers.”
Spend a few days at Berkeley, on the classically manicured slope overlooking San Francisco Bay and the distant Pacific, and soon enough the sound of foreign languages becomes less distinct. This is a global campus in a global age. And more than any time in its history, it looks toward the setting sun for its identity.
The revolution at Berkeley is a quiet one, a slow turning of the forces of immigration and demographics. What is troubling to some is that the big public school on the hill certainly does not look like the ethnic face of California, which is 12 percent Asian, more than twice the national average. But it is the new face of the state’s vaunted public university system. Asians make up the largest single ethnic group, 37 percent, at its nine undergraduate campuses.
The oft-cited goal of a public university is to be a microcosm — in this case, of the nation’s most populous, most demographically dynamic state — and to enrich the educational experience with a variety of cultures, economic backgrounds and viewpoints.
But 10 years after California passed Proposition 209, voting to eliminate racial preferences in the public sector, university administrators find such balance harder to attain. At the same time, affirmative action is being challenged on a number of new fronts, in court and at state ballot boxes. And elite colleges have recently come under attack for practicing it — specifically, for bypassing highly credentialed Asian applicants in favor of students of color with less stellar test scores and grades.
In California, the rise of the Asian campus, of the strict meritocracy, has come at the expense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics. This year, in a class of 4809, there are only 100 black freshmen at the University of California at Los Angeles — the lowest number in 33 years. At Berkeley, 3.6 percent of freshmen are black, barely half the statewide proportion. (In 1997, just before the full force of Proposition 209 went into effect, the proportion of black freshmen matched the state population, 7 percent.) The percentage of Hispanic freshmen at Berkeley (11 percent) is not even a third of the state proportion (35 percent). White freshmen (29 percent) are also below the state average (44 percent).
This is in part because getting into Berkeley — U.S. News & World Report’s top-ranked public university — has never been more daunting. There were 41,750 applicants for this year’s freshman class of 4,157. Nearly half had a weighted grade point average of 4.0 or better (weighted for advanced courses). There is even grumbling from “the old Blues” — older alumni named for the school color — “who complain because their kids can’t get in,” says Gregg Thomson, director of the Office of Student Research.
Mr. Hu applied to a lot of colleges, but Berkeley felt right for him from the start. “It’s the intellectual atmosphere — this place is intense.”
Mr. Hu says he was pressured by a professor to go into something like medicine or engineering. “It’s a stereotype, but a lot of Asians who come here just study engineering and the sciences,” he says. “I was never interested in that.”
But as the only son of professionals born in China, Mr. Hu fits the profile of Asians at Berkeley in at least one way: they are predominantly first-generation American. About 95 percent of Asian freshmen come from a family in which one or both parents were born outside the United States.
He dashes off to class, and I wander through the serene setting of Memorial Glade, in the center of campus, and then loop over to Sproul Plaza, the beating heart of the university, where dozens of tables are set up by clubs representing every conceivable ethnic group. Out of nowhere, an a cappella group, mostly Asian men, appears and starts singing a Beach Boys song. Yes, tradition still matters in California.
ACROSS the United States, at elite private and public universities, Asian enrollment is near an all-time high. Asian-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the population but typically make up 10 to 30 percent of students at the nation’s best colleges:in 2005, the last year with across-the-board numbers, Asians made up 24 percent of the undergraduate population at Carnegie Mellon and at Stanford, 27 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14 percent at Yale and 13 percent at Princeton.
And according to advocates of race-neutral admissions policies, those numbers should be even higher.
Asians have become the “new Jews,” in the phrase of Daniel Golden, whose recent book, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates,” is a polemic against university admissions policies. Mr. Golden, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is referring to evidence that, in the first half of the 20th century, Ivy League schools limited the number of Jewish students despite their outstanding academic records to maintain the primacy of upper-class Protestants. Today, he writes, “Asian-Americans are the odd group out, lacking racial preferences enjoyed by other minorities and the advantages of wealth and lineage mostly accrued by upper-class whites. Asians are typecast in college admissions offices as quasi-robots programmed by their parents to ace math and science.”
As if to illustrate the point, a study released in October by the Center for Equal Opportunity, an advocacy group opposing race-conscious admissions, showed that in 2005 Asian-Americans were admitted to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, at a much lower rate (54 percent) than black applicants (71 percent) and Hispanic applicants (79 percent) — despite median SAT scores that were 140 points higher than Hispanics and 240 points higher than blacks.
To force the issue on a legal level, a freshman at Yale filed a complaint in the fall with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, contending he was denied admission to Princeton because he is Asian. The student, Jian Li, the son of Chinese immigrants in Livingston, N.J., had a perfect SAT score and near-perfect grades, including numerous Advanced Placement courses.
“This is just a very, very egregious system,” Mr. Li told me. “Asians are held to different standards simply because of their race.”
To back his claim, he cites a 2005 study by Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung, both of Princeton, which concludes that if elite universities were to disregard race, Asians would fill nearly four of five spots that now go to blacks or Hispanics. Affirmative action has a neutral effect on the number of whites admitted, Mr. Li is arguing, but it raises the bar for Asians. The way Princeton selects its entering class, Mr. Li wrote in his complaint, “seems to be a calculated move by a historically white institution to protect its racial identity while at the same time maintaining a facade of progressivism.”
Private institutions can commit to affirmative action, even with state bans, but federal money could be revoked if they are found to be discriminating. Mr. Li is seeking suspension of federal financial assistance to Princeton. “I’m not seeking anything personally,” he says. “I’m happy at Yale. But I grew up thinking that in America race should not matter.”
Admissions officials have long denied that they apply quotas. Nonetheless, race is important “to ensure a diverse student body,” says Cass Cliatt, a Princeton spokeswoman. But, she adds, “Looking at the merits of race is not the same as the opposite” — discrimination.
Elite colleges like Princeton review the “total package,” in her words, looking at special talents, extracurricular interests and socioeconomics — factors like whether the applicant is the first in the family to go to college or was raised by a single mother. “There’s no set formula or standard for how we evaluate students,” she says. High grades and test scores would seem to be merely a baseline. “We turned away approximately half of applicants with maximum scores on the SAT, all three sections,” Ms. Cliatt says of the class Mr. Li would have joined.
In the last two months, the nation has seen a number of new challenges to racial engineering in schools. In November, the United States Supreme Court heard a case questioning the legality of using race in assigning students to public schools in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. Voters are also sending a message, having thrown out racial preferences in Michigan in November, following a lead taken by California, Texas, Florida and Washington. Last month, Ward Connerly, the architect of Proposition 209, announced his next potential targets for a ballot initiative, including Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Nebraska.
When I ask the chancellor at Berkeley, Robert J. Birgeneau, if there is a perfect demographic recipe on this campus that likes to think of itself as the world’s finest public university — Harvard on the Hill — he demurs.
“We are a meritocracy,” he says. And — by law, he adds — the campus is supposed to be that way. If Asians made up, say, 70 percent of the campus, he insists, there would still be no attempt to reduce their numbers.
Asian enrollment at his campus actually began to ramp up well before affirmative action was banned.
Historically, Asians have faced discrimination, with exclusion laws in the 1800s that kept them from voting, owning property or legally immigrating. Many were run out of West Coast towns by mobs. But by the 1970s and ’80s, with a change in immigration laws, a surge in Asian arrivals began to change the complexion of California, and it was soon reflected in an overrepresentation at its top universities.
In the late 1980s, administrators appeared to be limiting Asian-American admissions, prompting a federal investigation. The result was an apology by the chancellor at the time, and a vow that there would be no cap on Asian enrollment.
University administrators and teachers use anguished words to describe what has happened since.
“I’ve heard from Latinos and blacks that Asians should not be considered a minority at all,” says Elaine Kim, a professor of Asian-American studies at Berkeley. “What happened after they got rid of affirmative action has been a disaster — for blacks and Latinos. And for Asians it’s been a disaster because some people think the campus has become all-Asian.”
The diminishing number of African-Americans on campus is a consistent topic of discussion among black students. Some say they feel isolated, without a sense of community. “You really do feel like you stand out,” says Armilla Staley, a second-year law student. In her freshman year, she was one of only nine African-Americans in a class of 265. “I’m almost always the only black person in my class,” says Ms. Staley, who favors a return to some form of affirmative action.
“Quite frankly, when you walk around campus, it’s overwhelmingly Asian,” she says. “I don’t feel any tension between Asians and blacks, but I don’t really identify with the Asian community as a minority either.”
Walter Robinson, the director of undergraduate admissions, who is African-American, has the same impression. “The problem is that because we’re so few, we get absorbed among the masses,” he says.
Chancellor Birgeneau says he finds the low proportion of blacks and Hispanics appalling, and two years into his tenure, he has not found a remedy. To broaden the pool, the U.C. system promises to admit the top 4 percent at each high school in the state and uses “comprehensive review” — considering an applicant’s less quantifiable attributes. But the net results for a campus like Berkeley are disappointing. His university, Dr. Birgeneau says, loses talented black applicants to private universities like Stanford, where African-American enrollment was 10 percent last year — nearly three times that at Berkeley.
“I just don’t believe that in a state with three million African-Americans there is not a single engineering student for the state’s premier public university,” says the chancellor, who has called for reinstating racial preferences.
One leading critic of bringing affirmative action back to Berkeley is David A. Hollinger, chairman of its history department and author of “Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism.” He supported racial preferences before Proposition 209, but is no longer so sure. “You could argue that the campus is more diverse now,” because Asians comprise so many different cultures, says Dr. Hollinger. A little more than half of Asian freshmen at Berkeley are Chinese, the largest group, followed by Koreans, East-Indian/Pakistani, Filipino and Japanese.
He believes that Latinos are underrepresented because many come from poor agrarian families with little access to the good schools that could prepare them for the rigors of Berkeley. He points out that, on the other hand, many of the Korean students on campus are sons and daughters of parents with college degrees. In any event, he says, it is not the university’s job to fix the problems that California’s public schools produce.
Dr. Birgeneau agrees on at least one point: “I think we’re now at the point where the category of Asian is not very useful. Koreans are different from people from Sri Lanka and they’re different than Japanese. And many Chinese-Americans are a lot like Caucasians in some of their values and areas of interest.”
IF Berkeley is now a pure meritocracy, what does that say about the future of great American universities in the post-affirmative action age? Are we headed toward a day when all elite colleges will look something like Berkeley: relatively wealthy whites (about 60 percent of white freshmen’s families make $100,000 or more) and a large Asian plurality and everyone else underrepresented? Is that the inevitable result of color-blind admissions?
Eric Liu, author of “The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker” and a domestic policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton, is troubled by the assertion that the high Asian makeup of elite campuses reflects a post-racial age where merit prevails.
“I really challenge this idea of a pure meritocracy,” says Mr. Liu, who runs mentoring programs that grew out of his book “Guiding Lights: How to Mentor and Find Life’s Purpose.” Until all students — from rural outposts to impoverished urban settings — are given equal access to the Advanced Placement classes that have proved to be a ticket to the best colleges, then the idea of pure meritocracy is bunk, he says. “They’re measuring in a fair way the results of an unfair system.”
He also says Asian-Americans are tired of having to live up to — or defend — “that tired old warhorse of the model minority.”
“We shouldn’t be calling these studying habits that help so many kids get into good schools ‘Asian values,’ ” says Mr. Liu, himself a product of Yale College and Harvard Law School. “These are values that used to be called Jewish values or Anglo-Saxon work-ethic values. The bottom line message from the family is the same: work hard, defer gratification, share sacrifice and focus on the big goal.”
Hazel R. Markus lectures on this very subject as a professor of psychology at Stanford and co-director of its Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her studies have found that Asian students do approach academics differently. Whether educated in the United States or abroad, she says, they see professors as authority figures to be listened to, not challenged in the back-and-forth Socratic tradition. “You hear some teachers say that the Asian kids get great grades but just sit there and don’t participate,” she says. “Talking and thinking are not the same thing. Being a student to some Asians means that it’s not your place to question, and that flapping your gums all day is not the best thing.”
One study at the institute looked at Asian-American students in lab courses, and found they did better solving problems alone and without conversations with other students. “This can make for some big problems,” she says, like misunderstandings between classmates. “But people are afraid to talk about these differences. And one of the fantastic opportunities of going to a Stanford or Berkeley is to learn something about other cultures, so we should be talking about it.”
As for the rise in Asian enrollment, the reason “isn’t a mystery,” Dr. Markus says. “This needs to come out and we shouldn’t hide it,” she says. “In Asian families, the No. 1 job of a child is to be a student. Being educated — that’s the most honorable thing you can do.”
BERKELEY is “Asian heaven,” as one student puts it. “When I went back East my Asian friends were like, ‘Wow, you go to Berkeley — that must be great,’ ” says Tera Nakata, who just graduated and now works in the residence halls.
You need only go to colleges in, say, the Midwest to appreciate the Asian feel of this campus. But Berkeley is freighted with the baggage of stereotypes — that it is boring socially, full of science nerds, a hard place to make friends.
“About half the students at this school spend their entire career in the library,” one person wrote in a posting on vault.com, a popular job and college search Web site.
Another wrote: “Everyone who is white joins the Greek system and everyone who isn’t joins a ‘theme house’ or is a member of a club related to race.”
There is some truth to the image, students acknowledge, but it does not do justice to the bigger experience at Berkeley. “You have the ability to stay with people who are like you and not get out of your comfort zone,” says Ms. Nakata. “But I learned a lot by mixing it up. I lived in a dorm with a lot of different races, and we would have these deep conversations all the time about race and our feelings of where we belong and where we came from.” But she also says that the “celebrate diversity aspect” of Berkeley doesn’t go deep. “We want to respect everyone’s differences, but we don’t mix socially.”
Near the end of my stay at Berkeley I met a senior, Jonathan Lee, the son of a Taiwanese father and a mother from Hong Kong. He grew up well east of Los Angeles, in the New America sprawl of fast-growing Riverside County, where his father owned a restaurant. He went to a high school where he was a minority.
“When I was in high school,” he says, “there was this notion that you’re Chinese, you must be really good in math.” But now Mr. Lee is likely to become a schoolteacher, much to the chagrin of his parents, “who don’t think it will be very lucrative.”
The story of Jon Lee’s journey at Berkeley is compelling. As president of the Asian-American Association, he has tried to dispel stereotypes of “the Dragon Lady seductress or the idea that everybody plays the piano.” His closest friends are in the club. It may seem that he has become more insular, that he has found his tribe. But Mr. Lee says he has been trying to lead other Asian students out of the university bubble. Once a week, they go into a mostly black and Hispanic middle school in the Bay Area to mentor students.
For the last five semesters, Mr. Lee has worked with one student. “I take him out for dim sum, or to Chinatown, or just talk about college and what it’s like at Cal,” he says. “We talk about race and we talk about everything. And he’s taught me a lot.”
The mentoring program came about not because of prodding by well-meaning advisers, teachers or student groups. It came about because Mr. Lee looked around at the new America and found that it looked very different from Berkeley. And much as he loves Berkeley, he knew that if he wanted to learn enough to teach, he needed to get off campus.
Timothy Egan reports for The Times from the West Coast. He won a 2006 National Book Award for “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/education/edlife/07asian.html?ei=5070&en=2100b567250576d4&ex=1173243600&pagewanted=all
Saturday, March 3, 2007
Book It! Challenged as Exploitation
Critics Target Pizza Hut Reading ProgramBy DAVID CRARY | 02 Mar 2007 | 09:44 PMFont size: NEW YORK - You've read the book, now eat the pizza. Since 1985, that's been the gist of Pizza Hut's Book It, an incentive program used by 50,000 schools nationwide to reward young readers with free pizzas. The program is now under attack by child-development experts who say it promotes bad eating habits and turns teachers into corporate promoters.
Book It, which reaches about 22 million children a year, "epitomizes everything that's wrong with corporate-sponsored programs in school," said Susan Linn, a Harvard psychologist and co-founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.
"In the name of education, it promotes junk food consumption to a captive audience ... and undermines parents by positioning family visits to Pizza Hut as an integral component of raising literate children," Linn said.
This week, Linn's organization called on parents to end their schools' participation in the long-standing program.
Though some activists have previously questioned Book It, Linn said Friday that only after the recent upsurge of concern over child obesity and junk food did her group feel it could make headway with a formal protest campaign. She said many schools are trying to reduce students' access to soda, and contended that Book It should face similar scrutiny.
But the program _ which has given away more than 200 million pizzas _ has deep roots and many admirers at the highest levels of politics and education. It won a citation in 1988 from President Reagan, and its advisory board includes representatives of prominent education groups, including teachers unions and the American Library Association.
"We're really proud of the program," said Leslie Tubbs, its director for the past five years. "We get hundreds of e-mails from alumni who praise it and say it helped them get started with reading."
Dallas-based Pizza Hut says Book It is the nation's largest reading motivation program _ conducted annually in about 925,000 elementary school classrooms from Oct. 1 through March 31. A two-month program is offered for preschoolers.
Participating teachers set a monthly reading goal for each student; those who meet the goal get a certificate they can redeem at Pizza Hut for a free Personal Pan Pizza. Families often accompany the winners, turning the event into a celebration that can boost business for the restaurant.
Teachers find the program an enjoyable way to build interest in reading, Tubbs said. "We're helping them to do their jobs," she said.
At Strafford Elementary School in Strafford, Mo., the roughly 500 students collectively read 30,000 books a year with Book It's help, said principal Lucille Cogdill.
"I don't have any negative things at all to say about it," Cogdill said. "I know there's concern about obesity, but Book It is not causing it, and the schools aren't causing it."
Chris Carney, principal at Bennett Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., also is a Book It fan, saying it encourages family togetherness and provides a tool for persuading children to try books instead of video games.
"I don't want to see kids gorging pizzas," he said. "But the positive effects outweigh other effects."
Among those campaigning against Book It is Alfie Kohn, an author whose 11 books on education and parenting include "Punished By Rewards, which questions the value of incentive programs.
"The more kids see books as a way to get pizza or some other prize, the less interest they'll have in reading itself," Kohn, a former teacher, said in a telephone interview. "They tend to choose easier books to get through faster."
Another critic of Book It and the broader phenomenon of corporate incursions into schools is Alex Molnar, director of the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University.
He described Book It as a "dreadful program" that puts pressure on parents to celebrate with their reward-winning children at Pizza Huts.
"This is corporate America using the schools as a crow bar to get inside the front doors of students' homes," he said. "It's very hard for children whose parents who don't want to engage in this to not feel ostracized."
Molnar acknowledged that Book It is well-regarded by many educators and politicians, but said it might be reevaluated in light of rising concerns about child obesity.
"To the extent that this program is correctly identified as part of the problem, then there's a chance of reducing its scope," he said.
___
Book It: http://www.bookitprogram.com/
Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood: http://www.commercialexploitation.org/
http://www.cnbc.com/id/17422004/for/cnbc/
Book It, which reaches about 22 million children a year, "epitomizes everything that's wrong with corporate-sponsored programs in school," said Susan Linn, a Harvard psychologist and co-founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.
"In the name of education, it promotes junk food consumption to a captive audience ... and undermines parents by positioning family visits to Pizza Hut as an integral component of raising literate children," Linn said.
This week, Linn's organization called on parents to end their schools' participation in the long-standing program.
Though some activists have previously questioned Book It, Linn said Friday that only after the recent upsurge of concern over child obesity and junk food did her group feel it could make headway with a formal protest campaign. She said many schools are trying to reduce students' access to soda, and contended that Book It should face similar scrutiny.
But the program _ which has given away more than 200 million pizzas _ has deep roots and many admirers at the highest levels of politics and education. It won a citation in 1988 from President Reagan, and its advisory board includes representatives of prominent education groups, including teachers unions and the American Library Association.
"We're really proud of the program," said Leslie Tubbs, its director for the past five years. "We get hundreds of e-mails from alumni who praise it and say it helped them get started with reading."
Dallas-based Pizza Hut says Book It is the nation's largest reading motivation program _ conducted annually in about 925,000 elementary school classrooms from Oct. 1 through March 31. A two-month program is offered for preschoolers.
Participating teachers set a monthly reading goal for each student; those who meet the goal get a certificate they can redeem at Pizza Hut for a free Personal Pan Pizza. Families often accompany the winners, turning the event into a celebration that can boost business for the restaurant.
Teachers find the program an enjoyable way to build interest in reading, Tubbs said. "We're helping them to do their jobs," she said.
At Strafford Elementary School in Strafford, Mo., the roughly 500 students collectively read 30,000 books a year with Book It's help, said principal Lucille Cogdill.
"I don't have any negative things at all to say about it," Cogdill said. "I know there's concern about obesity, but Book It is not causing it, and the schools aren't causing it."
Chris Carney, principal at Bennett Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., also is a Book It fan, saying it encourages family togetherness and provides a tool for persuading children to try books instead of video games.
"I don't want to see kids gorging pizzas," he said. "But the positive effects outweigh other effects."
Among those campaigning against Book It is Alfie Kohn, an author whose 11 books on education and parenting include "Punished By Rewards, which questions the value of incentive programs.
"The more kids see books as a way to get pizza or some other prize, the less interest they'll have in reading itself," Kohn, a former teacher, said in a telephone interview. "They tend to choose easier books to get through faster."
Another critic of Book It and the broader phenomenon of corporate incursions into schools is Alex Molnar, director of the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University.
He described Book It as a "dreadful program" that puts pressure on parents to celebrate with their reward-winning children at Pizza Huts.
"This is corporate America using the schools as a crow bar to get inside the front doors of students' homes," he said. "It's very hard for children whose parents who don't want to engage in this to not feel ostracized."
Molnar acknowledged that Book It is well-regarded by many educators and politicians, but said it might be reevaluated in light of rising concerns about child obesity.
"To the extent that this program is correctly identified as part of the problem, then there's a chance of reducing its scope," he said.
___
Book It: http://www.bookitprogram.com/
Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood: http://www.commercialexploitation.org/
http://www.cnbc.com/id/17422004/for/cnbc/
Pizza Hut Book It!
BOOK IT! Home BOOK IT! Beginners Enrollment Administrators Teachers Parents BOOK IT! Store Partners Contact Us
Search for participating BOOK IT! schools and BOOK IT! Beginners facilities.
Celebrate, appreciate, and motivate your readers with these affordable incentives like t-shirts, key chains, pencils, and more!
Looking for the nearest Pizza Hut? Find it here.
Calling all BOOK IT! alumni! Visit the old school site to share your memories and see what others are saying!
2007 Newbery Medal Winner:
The Power of Lucky
by Susan Patron
Illustrated by Matt Phelan
2007 Caldecott Medal Winner:
Flotsom
by David Wiesner
Click here for more great titles!
03/05/07
BOOK IT! Beginners Kickoff
04/13/07
All-Star Reader Sweepstakes Entry Deadline... BOOK IT! teachers pack your bags! Find out how you can win a trip!
©2007 Pizza Hut, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Pizza Hut Store Locator
http://www.bookitprogram.com/
Search for participating BOOK IT! schools and BOOK IT! Beginners facilities.
Celebrate, appreciate, and motivate your readers with these affordable incentives like t-shirts, key chains, pencils, and more!
Looking for the nearest Pizza Hut? Find it here.
Calling all BOOK IT! alumni! Visit the old school site to share your memories and see what others are saying!
2007 Newbery Medal Winner:
The Power of Lucky
by Susan Patron
Illustrated by Matt Phelan
2007 Caldecott Medal Winner:
Flotsom
by David Wiesner
Click here for more great titles!
03/05/07
BOOK IT! Beginners Kickoff
04/13/07
All-Star Reader Sweepstakes Entry Deadline... BOOK IT! teachers pack your bags! Find out how you can win a trip!
©2007 Pizza Hut, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Pizza Hut Store Locator
http://www.bookitprogram.com/
Saturday, February 24, 2007
U.S. Contemplates Longer School Days
U.S. schools weigh extending their hours
By NANCY ZUCKERBROD and MELISSA TRUJILLO, Associated Press Writers 2 hours, 58 minutes ago
BOSTON - School principal Robin Harris used to see the clock on her office wall as the enemy, its steady ticking a reminder that time was not on her side.
But these days Harris smiles when the clock hits 1:55 p.m. There are still two more hours in the school day — two more hours to teach math and reading, art and drama.
Harris runs Fletcher-Maynard Academy, a combined public elementary and middle school in Cambridge, Mass., that is experimenting with an extended, eight-hour school day.
"It has sort of loosened up the pace," Harris said. "It's not as rushed and frenzied."
The school, which serves mostly poor, minority students, is one of 10 in the state experimenting with a longer day as part of a $6.5 million program.
While Massachusetts is leading in putting in place the longer-day model, lawmakers in Minnesota, New Mexico, New York and Washington, D.C., also have debated whether to lengthen the school day or year.
In addition, individual districts such as Miami-Dade in Florida are experimenting with added hours in some schools.
On average, U.S. students go to school 6.5 hours a day, 180 days a year, fewer than in many other industrialized countries, according to a report by the Education Sector, a Washington-based think tank.
One model that traditional public schools are looking to is the Knowledge is Power Program, which oversees public charter schools nationwide.
Those schools typically serve low-income middle-school students, and their test scores show success. Students generally go from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the week and for a few hours every other Saturday. They also go to school for several weeks in the summer.
That amounts to at least 50 percent more instructional time for students in such programs than in traditional public schools, according to the report.
The extended-day schedule costs on average about $1,200 extra per student, program spokesman Stephen Mancini said.
Massachusetts is spending about $1,300 per student extra on its extended-day effort.
Most of the extra cost goes into added pay for teachers. At Fletcher-Maynard, senior teachers can make up to $20,000 more per year for the extended hours, Harris said. Not all of the school's teachers have opted to work longer hours.
The National Education Association, the largest teacher's union, has no official opinion on extending the school day.
But its president, Reg Weaver, said teachers probably would support the idea if, like in Massachusetts, they could choose whether to work the longer hours.
He also said teachers must be adequately compensated and should have a say in setting the goals of any such effort.
An important impetus for the debate around extending school hours is the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The five-year-old law requires annual testing in reading and math for grades three through eight, and again in high school. All students are expected to be working on grade level by 2014.
Schools that fail to meet annual benchmarks are labeled as needing improvement and have to take steps to address the problem.
Up against such a tough requirement, extending the day makes sense, Harris said. "If you want kids to read, and you want to teach them how to read, they have to have time reading," she said.
Kathy Christie, a policy analyst at the Denver-based Education Commission of the States, said that law "has put enough pressure on more people to realize that the traditional school day is not enough to catch kids up."
Christie, whose Denver-based nonprofit focuses on school reform, added, "You can't keep taking away recess."
Schools that are experimenting with longer days are adding more down time and enrichment courses, as well as reading and math.
At Edwards Middle School, an extended-day school in Boston, students are staging musicals, designing book covers for favorite novels and coming up with new cheers to boost school spirit — an activity favored by 13-year-old Janice Tang.
"This is a class where I can express myself, be active," Tang said one afternoon after she pumped her arms in the air during a girls-only class that incorporates cheering with topics such as sex education and discouraging smoking. "It's very cool, and I have fun a lot."
Massachusetts' education commissioner, David Driscoll, said the offbeat classes get kids excited about a longer day.
"Once they're engaged, they'll learn other lessons," Driscoll said. "I think the big mistake that everybody makes is they think that education is all about the academics."
The No Child Left Behind law is due to be updated this year, and the lawmakers involved are eyeing the Massachusetts model.
U.S. Rep. George Miller (news, bio, voting record), the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said he likes the way schools in Massachusetts have invited community organizations to help with some enrichment courses.
"If you're just extending the day to bore the hell out of the child, why don't we all just all go home and save the overtime. You've got to rethink these models," said Miller, D-Calif.
U.S. Sen. Democrat Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), chairman of the Senate committee overseeing education, is considering allowing schools that fail to meet annual progress goals to extend their day as a possible solution.
Kennedy, D-Mass., also is considering putting AmeriCorps volunteers — recent college graduates who can help teach — into schools that adopt a longer day.
Extending the day has not been tackled extensively in high schools where many students have afterschool jobs or play sports.
The idea is not always applauded by parents, at least initially.
Dawn Oliver was so apprehensive about a plan this year to expand the day at her daughter's middle school in Fall River, Mass., that she considered pulling 11-year-old Brittany out.
"We all had the same thought in our head, which was, 'Oh my God, these kids are going to have their head in a book for the same amount of time as working a full-time job,'" Oliver said.
She said her fears began to fade, however, when she saw the list of electives the kids could take in the afternoon, including cooking and forensics. Those reinforce core lessons, Oliver said.
"They're making a magazine. She's an advice columnist," she said of Brittany. "The kids get so involved in these things because it's not all book work."
Oliver said the real benefits showed up on Brittany's report card, which improved from straight C's to B's.
"I did not foresee honor roll," Oliver said, brimming with pride.
___
AP Education Writer Nancy Zuckerbrod reported from Cambridge, Mass., and Washington.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070224/ap_on_re_us/longer_school_days
By NANCY ZUCKERBROD and MELISSA TRUJILLO, Associated Press Writers 2 hours, 58 minutes ago
BOSTON - School principal Robin Harris used to see the clock on her office wall as the enemy, its steady ticking a reminder that time was not on her side.
But these days Harris smiles when the clock hits 1:55 p.m. There are still two more hours in the school day — two more hours to teach math and reading, art and drama.
Harris runs Fletcher-Maynard Academy, a combined public elementary and middle school in Cambridge, Mass., that is experimenting with an extended, eight-hour school day.
"It has sort of loosened up the pace," Harris said. "It's not as rushed and frenzied."
The school, which serves mostly poor, minority students, is one of 10 in the state experimenting with a longer day as part of a $6.5 million program.
While Massachusetts is leading in putting in place the longer-day model, lawmakers in Minnesota, New Mexico, New York and Washington, D.C., also have debated whether to lengthen the school day or year.
In addition, individual districts such as Miami-Dade in Florida are experimenting with added hours in some schools.
On average, U.S. students go to school 6.5 hours a day, 180 days a year, fewer than in many other industrialized countries, according to a report by the Education Sector, a Washington-based think tank.
One model that traditional public schools are looking to is the Knowledge is Power Program, which oversees public charter schools nationwide.
Those schools typically serve low-income middle-school students, and their test scores show success. Students generally go from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the week and for a few hours every other Saturday. They also go to school for several weeks in the summer.
That amounts to at least 50 percent more instructional time for students in such programs than in traditional public schools, according to the report.
The extended-day schedule costs on average about $1,200 extra per student, program spokesman Stephen Mancini said.
Massachusetts is spending about $1,300 per student extra on its extended-day effort.
Most of the extra cost goes into added pay for teachers. At Fletcher-Maynard, senior teachers can make up to $20,000 more per year for the extended hours, Harris said. Not all of the school's teachers have opted to work longer hours.
The National Education Association, the largest teacher's union, has no official opinion on extending the school day.
But its president, Reg Weaver, said teachers probably would support the idea if, like in Massachusetts, they could choose whether to work the longer hours.
He also said teachers must be adequately compensated and should have a say in setting the goals of any such effort.
An important impetus for the debate around extending school hours is the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The five-year-old law requires annual testing in reading and math for grades three through eight, and again in high school. All students are expected to be working on grade level by 2014.
Schools that fail to meet annual benchmarks are labeled as needing improvement and have to take steps to address the problem.
Up against such a tough requirement, extending the day makes sense, Harris said. "If you want kids to read, and you want to teach them how to read, they have to have time reading," she said.
Kathy Christie, a policy analyst at the Denver-based Education Commission of the States, said that law "has put enough pressure on more people to realize that the traditional school day is not enough to catch kids up."
Christie, whose Denver-based nonprofit focuses on school reform, added, "You can't keep taking away recess."
Schools that are experimenting with longer days are adding more down time and enrichment courses, as well as reading and math.
At Edwards Middle School, an extended-day school in Boston, students are staging musicals, designing book covers for favorite novels and coming up with new cheers to boost school spirit — an activity favored by 13-year-old Janice Tang.
"This is a class where I can express myself, be active," Tang said one afternoon after she pumped her arms in the air during a girls-only class that incorporates cheering with topics such as sex education and discouraging smoking. "It's very cool, and I have fun a lot."
Massachusetts' education commissioner, David Driscoll, said the offbeat classes get kids excited about a longer day.
"Once they're engaged, they'll learn other lessons," Driscoll said. "I think the big mistake that everybody makes is they think that education is all about the academics."
The No Child Left Behind law is due to be updated this year, and the lawmakers involved are eyeing the Massachusetts model.
U.S. Rep. George Miller (news, bio, voting record), the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said he likes the way schools in Massachusetts have invited community organizations to help with some enrichment courses.
"If you're just extending the day to bore the hell out of the child, why don't we all just all go home and save the overtime. You've got to rethink these models," said Miller, D-Calif.
U.S. Sen. Democrat Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), chairman of the Senate committee overseeing education, is considering allowing schools that fail to meet annual progress goals to extend their day as a possible solution.
Kennedy, D-Mass., also is considering putting AmeriCorps volunteers — recent college graduates who can help teach — into schools that adopt a longer day.
Extending the day has not been tackled extensively in high schools where many students have afterschool jobs or play sports.
The idea is not always applauded by parents, at least initially.
Dawn Oliver was so apprehensive about a plan this year to expand the day at her daughter's middle school in Fall River, Mass., that she considered pulling 11-year-old Brittany out.
"We all had the same thought in our head, which was, 'Oh my God, these kids are going to have their head in a book for the same amount of time as working a full-time job,'" Oliver said.
She said her fears began to fade, however, when she saw the list of electives the kids could take in the afternoon, including cooking and forensics. Those reinforce core lessons, Oliver said.
"They're making a magazine. She's an advice columnist," she said of Brittany. "The kids get so involved in these things because it's not all book work."
Oliver said the real benefits showed up on Brittany's report card, which improved from straight C's to B's.
"I did not foresee honor roll," Oliver said, brimming with pride.
___
AP Education Writer Nancy Zuckerbrod reported from Cambridge, Mass., and Washington.
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