Why it's hard to get rid of bad teachers

The graphic was posted at the Chicago Tribune.

If this topic interests you, you really need to listen to This American Life's 2008 presentation of "The Rubber Room"-

We hear from New York City school teachers about a secret room in the New York City Board of Education building. Teachers are told to report there, and when they arrive, they find out they're under investigation for something. They have to wait in this room all day, every day, until the matter is cleared up. They call this bureaucratic purgatory "the rubber room." Some teachers have been stuck in it for years.

And it's only fair to point out that the problems noted in the graphic regarding weeding out bad teachers applies equally to getting rid of bad doctors.  And bad lawyers. 

Via The Daily Dish.

Mr. Wizard

 

 I'm not familiar with this particular chemistry item, but I do have strong and pleasant memories of the Watch Mr. Wizard television series in the 1950s, which helped establish and maintain my personal interest in the hard sciences.

At some future time I'll post a biography of Don Herbert and a video of one of his television programs, but I just found this today and decided to post it for Steve up in Minnesota.

An indictment of university research and teaching priorities

From an article at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students...

Teaching is suffering at universities because the institutions prize research success above all other factors in promotions, they said. The job of educating students offers little reward, and instead "often carries the derogatory label 'teaching load,'"...

... universities have become so obsessed with using federal dollars to build new research facilities that they've skewed their priorities, leading both faculty members and students to see the competition for federal money as their main professional mission.

Mr. Mann, who served as chairman of biochemistry at Vermont from 1984 to 2005, said grant money made up about 22 percent of his salary as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota back in 1970. Now it's 60 percent, as he pulls in about $3-million a year in federal support, and administrators at Vermont are asking him to push it even higher...

The article has drawn a lot of commentary, including this observation:

Some of the emphasis on pulling in research funding can be traced to the shift in how public higher education institutions are funded. Prior to the anti-tax era, many of our 'public' institutions were funded at 80% by states using tax revenues. With the over emphais on tax cuts for the past 30 years, we are seeing the impacts in higher ed.

Now many (most) big institutions received closer to 10% from the states. The higher funding levels funded operations and permitted reasonable tuition rates. With less funding, universities rely more on tuition, loans, and indirect costs from research grants to make up funding formerly provided by the states...

The article strikes a chord with me.  I entered academia in the late '70s, and the Chairman at my first faculty appointment greeted me with a pat on the back and the comment "We'd like you to do some research while you're here."  Within twenty years I saw a dramatic shift in emphasis.  Faculty were expected to earn a much higher proportion of their salary from research grants, corporations had taken a much larger role within the universities, and teaching of students had begun to be viewed by many faculty as an impediment to their careers.  Those changes in the environment contributed to my decision to opt for early retirement.

How much do students learn in college?

Excerpts from an AP article in today's StarTribune:

A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.

Not much is asked of students, either. Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

The findings are in a new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," by sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia...

The book is based on information from 24 schools, meant to be a representative sample, that provided Collegiate Learning Assessment data on students who took the standardized test in their first semester in fall 2005 and at the end of their sophomore years in spring 2007. The schools took part on the condition that their institutions not be identified.

More at the link, and elsewhere on the web (this is being discussed in a variety of forums and news outlets this week).

Unemployment rates vs. education

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the last two decades.  Comparable data for the years 2007-2009 are graphed in an interactive chart at the New York Times; at the link you can see your own cohort sorted by race, sex, age, and educational attainment.

The following comments re the chart above are from Scenarios and Strategy:

Clearly, from an individual’s point-of-view, it’s still smarter to get more education than less.  But the perturbations of past periods remind us that the gearing between between academic degrees and financial success isn’t always perfectly tight…  Indeed, those with sharply-defined professional credentials in fields– e.g, finance– that are unlikely even in the intermediate term (if ever) to recover their bubble-fueled growth rates, may find their advanced degrees at best unhelpful; at worst, downright prejudicial...

All of which underlines for your correspondent the extraordinary value of a liberal arts education. When one is faced with a “working adulthood” that is one transitional challenge after another, no skill is more valuable than the capacity to adapt. And no capability is more central to that adaptation than the ability effectively and efficiently to learn.

This is precisely what, at its core, a liberal arts education is about: learning to learn...

More at the link. I would add one other thought.  It might not be the college degree per se that allows one to retain a job or find a new one during a downturn.  It might be, rather, that people who have the motivation, intelligence, and economic resources that allow them to achieve a college degree are the ones who will adapt and succeed.

Helping children identify colors

Over the last several years, we’ve been particularly taken with the question of how kids learn... color words... The test was not designed to trip kids up. Far from it—we only tested basic color words, and we never made kids pick between confusable shades, like red and pink. To an adult, the test would be laughably easy. Yet, after several months of testing two-year olds, I could count my high scorers on one hand. Most would fail the test outright...

Divorced from context, most two and three-year olds might as well be colorblind; certainly they look that way when asked to correctly identify colors in a line-up, or accurately use color words in novel contexts. What’s more, psychologists have found that even after hours and hours of repeated training on color words, children’s performance typically fails to noticeably improve, and children as old as six continue to make major color naming errors...

As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curve ball: we like to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. So, we’ll often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.”...

That was the idea, anyway, and the prediction was simple: using color words after nouns should make colors far easier to learn, and should make kids far faster at learning them. To test this, we took a couple dozen two-year olds and gave them some quick training on color words...

We found that the kids who got the postnominal training improved significantly over their baseline test scores, whereas the ones who got the prenominal training still looked just as confused as ever...

More re the methodology and the technique at Scientific American, via Not Exactly Rocket Science.  Photo source.

Grade inflation in British universities

Degree results obtained by The Sunday Telegraph show six out of 10 students were handed either a first or an upper second in 2010, compared with just one in three graduates in 1970...

The latest data shows that the criteria for awarding degrees has changed dramatically - despite complaints from many universities that grade inflation at A-level has made it hard for them to select candidates...

The universities awarding the highest proportion of firsts or 2:1s last year were Exeter, where 82 per cent of graduates received the top degrees compared with just 29 per cent in 1970, and St Andrews – Scotland's oldest university, where Prince William met fiancée Kate Middleton – where the figure was also 82 per cent compared with just 25 per cent in 1970. Imperial College London and Warwick both granted 80 per cent firsts or 2:1s last year, compared with 49 per cent and 39 per cent respectively in 1970. At Bath University the figure was 76 per cent last year compared with just 35 per cent in 1970...

"There has been compromise across the system and employers no longer fully trust degree results, and tend to look back to A-level results as a more reliable indicator...

More at the Telegraph link.

Two of the hardest questions on the KWC quiz...

... are the ones highlighted above.  Speculation re Harry Potter wizards has led nowhere.  I wondered about British golfer Justin Rose, but he appears not to have a "Wizard" nickname.  If any TYWKIWDBI readers have suggestions, I would welcome hearing them.

Addendum:  A big hat tip to "Numerophile" who found the answer to #3:

Eileen Nearne, codename Agent Rose, was a wartime radio operator in the Wizard network in France. She died on 2 September in Torquay. 

The answer to 18-4 remains totally obscure. 

Second addendum:  Willofgod suggests "Angie Bowness. Sir Clive Sinclair married the beauty queen after 417 day engagment."  I've seen this argued at another board, where they are trying to get confirmation on the 417 day period.  Daily Mail story here.

Third addendum:  The best answer seems to have been found by Robert Iain and Wireman:

"George John Patrick Dominic Townshend, 7th Marquess Townshend, succeeded to his peerage on 17 Nov 1921. On 2 March 2009, he became the longest ever holder of a peerage, surpassing the 13th Lord Sinclair (see below). He died on 23 April 2010, having held the peerage for 88 years, 157 days.

From March 2, 2009 to April 23, 2010 is... 417 days.

(Previous post re the KWC quiz here).

Wireless

Via Camille Reads.

King William's College "Christmas Quiz" 2010

For over a century, students at King William's College on the Isle of Man have been given a quiz (formally the "General Knowledge Paper") just before the Christmas holidays:

Up until 1999, pupils at King William's College would sit the paper unseen on the last day of term before the Christmas holidays. The questions are very hard and often cryptic, and pupils got hardly any questions right first time: five percent was considered a good score! During the Christmas holidays, pupils tried to find the answers to the harder questions by consulting reference books or asking clever relatives. When they returned to school in the New Year, they took the test again, under exam conditions and without the aid of notes.

The quiz is now voluntary for the students, but has spread worldwide via publication in The Guardian.  It is, as noted above, inhumanly difficult, requiring impossible amounts of knowledge of trivia and/or extraordinary computer search skills -

A Latin phrase is always printed at the top of the quiz: “Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis
ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est”.  Freely translated, this means "the greatest part of knowledge is knowing where to find something."

The best way to approach the quiz is as part of a group, many of which will form on the internet in the weeks ahead.

I'm not going to reproduce the entire quiz here.  Those who want to tackle the project can download the quiz from the King William's College website, or view the questions where they were printed in The Guardian this morning.

To give everyone a taste of the quiz, here is the sixth set of 10 questions:

1 What was updated by HG Wells?
2 What might be perceived as an apiary?
3 Which island is doubly recognised on 198?
4 Who left great designs in the Gulf and New South Wales?
5 Who, aided by wizardry, cuckolded his rival by impersonating him?
6 Who, being the son of Suzanne, changed his name through the benevolence of her friend Miguel?
7 What did hateful and rough weeds lose apart from beauty?
8 What was the native city of a unique pontiff?
9 What can be used instead of mahogany?
10 Who recruited Hare for Dad's Army?

Each set of ten questions has a "theme."  I"ll give you a hint that for this sixth set above, the theme is that every answer begins with the same pair of letters.  Partial answer in the Comments.

Update:  ALL the answers are now in the Comments.  Hat tips to BJN, Lene Taylor, and Greg.

If you really thrive on intellectual challenges like this, the King William's College website posts the quizzes and the answers for the past three years.

Muslim students find acceptance at Catholic colleges

Excerpts from an article in the Washington Post:

In the past few years, enrollment of Muslim students such as Shabnan has spiked at Catholic campuses across the country. Last year, Catholic colleges had an even higher percentage of Muslim students than the average four-year institution in the United States, according to the Higher Education Research Institute. The influx has astonished and sometimes befuddled administrators. Some Catholic campuses are creating prayer rooms for new Muslim students and hiring Islamic chaplains to minister to them. Others are unsure how to adapt...

Muslim students say they enroll at Catholic schools for many of the same reasons as their classmates: attractive campuses, appealing professors and academic programs that fit their interests. But there is also a spiritual attraction to the values that overlap the two faiths.

"Because it is an overtly religious place, it's not strange or weird to care about your religion here, to pray and make God a priority," said Shabnan, a political science major who often covers her head with a pale beige scarf. "They have the same values we do."

Georgetown University, whose Muslim student numbers have also been climbing, has a prayer room, student association and an entire center devoted to Muslim-Christian understanding, and the school hired a full-time Muslim chaplain in 1999. Catholic administrators at colleges that have added similar features say they haven't perceived the efforts as a challenge to their religious identity.

"We're not going to take down the cross or change our name. We're proud of who we are," said Marco Masini, associate vice president of student life at Benedictine University in Illinois. "Hospitality is a part of the Benedictine philosophy, so it's important we welcome individuals of all faiths."

Basiri said his Islamic faith has grown and matured in the past four years while studying in buildings named after Catholic leaders, in classrooms adorned with crucifixes, and with classmates often named after saints.

"The face of my prophet and my God has changed," he said. "It is even more beautiful now."

More at the link.

States Quietly Raising Speed Limits Near Failing Schools

Headline and photo courtesy of The Onion.

School librarians are targets for budget cutters

Librarians have become a popular target as school administrators look for ways to cut budgets. A quarter of [Minnesota]'s librarians have lost their jobs in the past decade, with 767 remaining to serve the state's 1,992 public schools...

The cuts come at a time when information overload is the rule and, librarians say, though their jobs have changed, the need for them is greater than ever. Navigating information for a report on Frederick Douglass, for example, can be dizzying for a 10-year-old...

Librarians say media centers are often manned by parent volunteers, who aren't certified and rarely become involved with such things as updating book collections or teaching research skills to students.

Librarians, once a staple in schools, don't come cheap. Most have two, sometimes three, master's degrees. Their average annual salaries generally can range from $50,000 to $70,000.  The exodus has been steady since Minnesota legislators in 1996 got rid of a statute that required districts to have a minimum of one librarian per school. It has accelerated in the past five years as schools have tightened their budgets.  Librarians are funded through discretionary funds -- or all the money left over after they pay for teachers, administrators, secretaries and literacy coaches.

More at the StarTribune link.  A sad commentary on our times.

Bake Sale for Bombers

Artist unknown, via J-Walk.

Rethinking "going to college"

This week the Chronicle of Higher Education offered the chart above and asked "why did these people go to college?"

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree...

Now it is true that college has a consumption as well as investment function. People often enjoy going to classes, just as they enjoy watching movies or taking trips. They love the socialization dimensions of schooling—particularly in this age of the country-clubization of American universities. They may improve their self-esteem by earning a college degree. Yet, at a time when resources are scarce, when American governments are running $1.3-trillion deficits, when we face huge unfunded liabilities associated with commitments made to our growing elderly population, should we be subsidizing increasingly problematic educational programs for students whose prior academic record would suggest little likelihood of academic, much less vocational, success?

The article offers one viewpoint on a complicated issue; personally I think it's a rather narrow-minded viewpoint at that.  There are some thoughtful and well-informed counterpoints presented in the responses to the article.

Schools may allow advertising on students' lockers. And on the walls. And on the floor.

I'm absolutely appalled by this.

School lockers are becoming the latest venue for bombarding kids with advertising.

Just what that will look like is on display at the north suburban Centennial school administration building: four lockers wrapped in a bubblegum pink ad for the Mall of America's "Underwater Adventures" aquarium.

On Nov. 1, the school board is slated to decide whether it will allow the ads on up to 10 percent of the available surfaces in all of the district's seven schools. That includes lockers, walls and floors. The take for the district? $184,000 a year.

In a bleak economy, with dim prospects for any new state school funding, Centennial -- with $3.6 million in cuts this year and more likely on the way next year -- is just the latest school district looking at the ads as an alternative way to generate some cash. Paul Miller, president of Coon Rapids-based School Media's, the company that would install the ads, said he expects to have nine Twin Cities school districts signed up by the end of the year.

The rest of the story is at the StarTribune.

Jessica is confused

Credit.

Addendum: Reposted because today I found the perfect photo to explain Jessica's confusion:

"Ignorent peopl"

I'll pass over "Painting Nails" as an "activity" and "Milk and Cereal" as an interest, and I won't criticize her choices of favorite music, but when her entry under favorite books is "Fuck That Shit," it reflects rather badly on her rant about "ignorent peopl."

Via Reddit.

National ACT scores released

New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level courses, despite modest gains in college-readiness among U.S high-school students in the last few years...

In the recent results, only 24% of the graduating class of 2010 scored high enough on the ACT in math, reading, English and science to ensure they would pass entry-level college courses. This is a slight uptick from last year, when 23% were ready for college, and from 2008, when 22% were ready.  Still, 28% of students didn't score high enough on even one subject-matter exam to ensure college readiness...

ACT officials say a more diverse test-taking population partly explains the less-than-stellar results. African-American and Hispanic students made up 24% of the test-taking pool this year, compared with about 19% four years ago. African-American and Hispanic students generally post lower scores than their white and Asian counterparts.

But ACT officials and national experts say a weakened high-school curriculum is also at fault. The testing data show that even when students take a core curriculum—defined as four years of English and three years each of math, science and social studies—they aren't likely to be college-ready.

About 70% of students who sat for the ACT took a core curriculum in high school, but only 29% met college-readiness standards on all four subject exams...

Joseph Harris, director of the National High School Center at the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization, said high schools, traditionally, were good at preparing a select group of students for college. But as low-skill jobs disappeared in the global economy, more students migrated from shop and home economics to the core curriculum.

More at the Wall Street Journal.

Giving students a "global education"

The following is excerpted from a pdf file describing some aspects of the curriculum at The Blake School, a college preparatory school in Minnesota.

[S]tudents are introduced to the French language and culture in kindergarten and first grade and to the Japanese language and culture in second and third grades. In fourth and fifth grades, students learn to read and speak Spanish while studying the culture and geography of Spanish-speaking countries around the world. In Middle School, students study French, Spanish, Latin, or Mandarin Chinese. In Upper School students continue advanced classes in their chosen language, literature, and culture…

From kindergarten through fifth grade, language studies of French, Japanese, and Spanish are closely aligned with social studies. Students in sixth grade study the culture (including religion) and geography of North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, and Southeast Asia, and then in seventh and eighth grade, they explore the roots of western civilization and democracy in Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, and Enlightenment Europe before turning their attention to the role of the United States in the world.

In ninth grade, social studies and English classes focus on current issues and the literature of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia; the two courses are interdisciplinary and, at times, team taught. In eleventh and twelfth grade, students must take at least one elective international course, and most take more than one. The current offerings are courses on China and Japan, comparative religion, early European civilization, global community (which is a Model United Nations course), human geography, Latin American studies, modern European civilization, African studies, and South East Asia studies…

When I read that I thought about my own pre-collegiate education 50 years ago, which included three years of Latin, three of German, one middle school course on geography, and one upper school course in history.  I went off to college feeing better prepared than most, but it pales in comparison to what some high school students experience today.