By Fermin Leal –

Cal State Long Beach will send out rejection letters to a record 36,200 qualified applicants for the fall semester simply because the university doesn’t have enough space.

Long Beach, a campus once lauded for providing access to most eligible California students seeking admission, now rejects more qualified applicants than all but a handful of the state’s public universities.

It’s a trend that troubles Long Beach president Jane Close Conoley.

“Other schools use their low admissions rates as a point of pride. Anything rare becomes more desirable,” she said. “We do not want to go down the path of saying we’re becoming an elite university that only takes the best and brightest.”

What’s playing out at Long Beach illustrates the dichotomy between California’s goal of ensuring students leave high school ready for college and careers, and its public universities’ ability to increase access for qualified students. College preparedness is a major goal of a range of reforms being implemented in California’s K-12 schools, including the Local Control Funding Formula and the Common Core standards in English and math.

Most of the California State University system’s 22 other campuses are also rejecting a record number of qualified students, mostly because state funding has not kept pace with the growing student population combined with the rising numbers who are meeting the minimum admissions requirements.

Perhaps nowhere is the problem more evident than at Long Beach, which has become more selective as the number of applications has soared to a higher level than at any other CSU campus.

Last year, the average freshman came in with a GPA of 3.5, a record high.

“We do not want to go down the path of saying we’re becoming an elite university that only takes the best and brightest,” said Jane Close Conoley, university president.

Over the last decade, Long Beach has seen the admission rate drop from 53 percent to 33 percent for fall 2015 as the number of applicants climbed to nearly 100,000, an increase of more than 60 percent.

It is one of six universities that has been declared an “impacted” campus in the CSU system. According to CSU, that means it has “exhausted its existing enrollment capacity in terms of its instructional resources and physical capacity.” The other campuses are those in Fullerton, Fresno, San Diego, San Jose and San Luis Obispo.

An impacted campus can raise its admissions standards beyond the minimum CSU requirements, which are determined by a combination of a student’s grades on the high school A-G course sequence required for admission and his or her score on the SAT or ACT.

“It’s almost as if you need to rank in the very top of your (high school) class now if you want to be admitted,” said Theresa Song, a freshman majoring in biology. “I feel grateful that I was accepted. At the same time, so many of my friends, who are really good students, have gotten left out.”

FERMIN LEAL/EDSOURCE TODAY

Song said that for those who are admitted, they generally are able to find the courses and services they need because the increased selectivity has kept the campus from becoming overcrowded.

“I understand the need to close the doors to so many qualified students,” she said. “But at the same time, that shouldn’t be the role of public universities.”

Weekends and summer?

Cal State Long Beach this year received state funding for 37,400 students. The university’s enrollment has remained relatively flat, increasing by about 1,800 students since 2006, even as tens of thousands more students apply.

Taking in more would mean larger classes and stretching thin other programs and services, the president said.

But officials are now studying some initiatives that could allow the university to boost the number of students it admits, Conoley said.

They include offering more weekend and summer courses, boosting the number of online classes, and providing more support for students to improve graduation rates. Currently, 64 percent of students require up to six years to get their degrees.

 But all of that would allow enrollment to increase by only 10 to 15 percent.

 Growing demand at ‘The Beach’

The university remains among the most popular CSU campuses and has historically drawn more students from outside its region. Students, faculty and administrators say that’s because of the university’s location, reputation and variety of programs.

The sprawling 323-acre campus, nicknamed “The Beach,” is located in Los Angeles County on the Orange County border – the state’s two most populated counties. It also offers 87 majors, the widest range of any CSU.

Long Beach first began turning away freshmen applicants in 2002 when the number of applicants for freshman admission who met the system’s minimum admissions criteria exceeded the number of available spaces.

Back then, Van Novack, assistant vice president of institutional research and assessment, said in a university report, “We were not denying these students a four-year college degree. We were just denying them the opportunity to obtain it here.”

State studies show that at least 70 percent of applicants rejected by CSU campuses ended up attending other colleges. (Thirty percent could not be tracked.)

By 2013, the admissions crunch at Long Beach expanded to transfer students across all majors.

For this fall, Long Beach will receive about 102,000 applications for undergraduate and graduate admission, more than any other CSU campus. Only UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Irvine and UC Berkeley are expected to receive more applications among all California’s public universities.

Tougher admission standards

Because of the growing demand, Long Beach continues to steadily raise academic requirements for admission. That includes requiring higher high school GPAs and SAT or ACT scores.

Freshmen applicants within the university’s local admissions area, those students graduating from the 40 public and private high schools surrounding the university, are still guaranteed admission if they meet the campus’ minimum academic requirements, unless they apply to a major such as nursing and business, which have among the highest demand, said Tom Enders, Long Beach’s associate vice president of enrollment services.

But the minimum academic requirements now are at least 10 percent higher for local applicants than they were just five years ago, meaning that thousands of area students who would have qualified for admission then are today ineligible.

Students from outside Long Beach’s local admission area face even stricter admissions requirements, now needing GPAs close to 4.0 to even be considered.

Of the approximately 32,000 students admitted for the upcoming fall semester, first priority is given to applicants from the local admissions area, then to those with the strongest academic résumés.

Most of the students being rejected are freshmen applicants from outside the local admissions area, Enders said. That means most have GPAs well above 3.5. About 8,700 transfer applicants are also being rejected.

Stephen Williams, a counselor at Eagle Rock High School in Los Angeles, said he now advises his students to avoid altogether applying to high-demand universities, including Long Beach.

The irony, he said, is that students he’s counseled in recent years are much more prepared for college than in the past 30 years. They have significantly higher GPAs and more are taking the rigorous coursework, but are less likely to find a spot at universities such as Long Beach, he said.

“We have found the need to counteract the ‘hype’ that some schools have, the name recognition,” he said. “Students need to look at programs at other campuses for more wonderful educational experiences.”

He said counselors in the region now encourage students to consider Cal State Los Angeles and Cal State Dominguez Hills, each within 25 miles of Long Beach, as more realistic alternatives. The admission rate this year at Dominguez Hills was 63 percent, while 70 percent of applicants were admitted to Los Angeles compared to 33 percent at Long Beach.

Capping growth

Long Beach’s total enrollment has actually declined since 2008, when it reached a peak of nearly 38,000 students.

The state’s recession, which prompted lawmakers to cut a combined $1 billion from the CSU between 2008 and 2012, forced the university to slash enrollment by nearly 12 percent at one point. Over the past five years, as funding has been restored, enrollment has steadily climbed back up to about 37,400 students.

Conoley, the university president, said her priority has always been to keep total enrollment tied to state funding. Overspending would result in larger class sizes, fewer courses and strained counseling services.

“Because we didn’t open the doors to everyone, more students get the classes they need,” she said. “They don’t get sidetracked.”

Douglas Domingo-Forasté, professor of classic literature at the university, said that many of his students arrive better prepared and are more likely to earn higher grades. But he worries this increased selectivity hurts the university’s long-standing commitment to the middle class.

“Universities like Long Beach were founded for students who didn’t have the means to go to the UC or to a private school,” he said. “Right now, there are so many people waiting to get in, it’s unreal. In some majors, we have 10 applications for every available spot.”

Sandra Rodriguez, a junior majoring in sociology, said she felt distraught when she was denied admission as a freshman. She eventually was admitted to Long Beach as a transfer student after spending two years at Cerritos College, a nearby community college.

“There is a lot more pressure to do well because I feel like I had to work extra hard to get here,” she said. “I hear the same thing from other students. There’s definitely more motivation and competition here than I expected. But maybe that’s a good thing.”

Creative solutions needed

CSU leaders have offered possible solutions they say can allow Long Beach and other universities to add more applicants without big hikes in state aid.

Long Beach has begun adding more weekend and online classes and increased support for students to complete degrees faster.

Conoley said another proposal currently on the table is to convert Long Beach into a year-round school, with a full summer semester. However, this plan likely faces more hurdles because it would require the state to significantly increase financial aid to cover the extra semester.

“Right now, a lot of students don’t take summer school because they’ve run out of financial aid,” Conoley said.

Expanding financial aid to summer classes would increase each student’s award by up to 33 percent. Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed 2016-17 budget, released in January, increases financial aid by just 2 percent. No funds are aimed at providing aid for summer sessions.

Still, none of these proposals goes far enough to address the 36,200 qualified applicants Long Beach is turning away this year, Conoley said.

“We’re going to have to revolutionize the way we fund higher education in this state so every student who wants a higher education is able to get one,” the president said. “It’s really a sad comment on our time that we are not engaged in this process yet.”

Source:

Year	Total Applications	Percent Admitted	Percent Denied	Percent Incomplete
2006	62,531	53%	32%	15%
2007	65,517	49%	36%	16%
2008	67,816	44%	41%	15%
2009	68,851	32%	50%	18%
2010	79,050	31%	51%	18%
2011	78,991	31%	52%	17%
2012	84,776	34%	48%	18%
2013	91,738	34%	48%	18%
2014	93,782	35%	49%	16%
2015	96,025	33%	51%	16%

 

Source: Rising number of rejections raises fears that Long Beach is becoming ‘elite’ university | EdSource

 

There’s more to it than social media

By Roger Riddell –

Jimmy Casas, principal of Bettendorf High School in Iowa, and Jeff Zoul, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning in Deerfield, IL, credit their friendship to Twitter. Both can attest that the social media platform has changed their lives personally and professionally — and it can do the same for other educators.

But there’s also more to being connected than social media alone.

Together with Todd Whitaker, Casas and Zoul co-authored the book, “What Connected Educators Do Differently,” an examination of how connecting with peers nationwide and even globally can help educators boost success in their own schools. At the National Association of Secondary School Principals’ 2016 Ignite conference last week in Orlando, the duo broke down characteristics and practices that set connected educators apart from their peers.

1. They lead with passion

Casas, Zoul, and Whitaker have defined a connected educator as “any educator who is actively and continuously seeking new opportunities, people, and resources outside of their own school or district to grow as a professional.”

Connected educators, Zoul also noted, are leaders among their peers, citing five exemplary leadership practices from James Kouzes and Barry Posner’s “The Leadership Challenge.” According to those practices, good leaders:

1. Model the way: Create standards of excellence and then set an example for others. If you ask staff to do something, such as being connected to stakeholders via social media, you must be willing to do it yourself.
2. Inspire a shared vision: Envision the future, creating an ideal and unique image of what the organization can become — but it has to be real, even if there are different ways to get there. The vision must also be promoted and seen by parents, students, the community, and other stakeholders.
3. Challenge the process: Search for opportunities to change the status quo. Being connected helps educators continue pushing themselves with new challenges, providing examples of how to do that.
4. Enable others to act: Foster collaboration and build spirited teams, actively involving others. Some schools accomplish this via staff-led or self-directed professional development, and being connected can add new layers.
5. Encourage the heart: Accomplish extraordinary things in organizations by working hard, keeping hope and determination alive by recognizing contributions made by those in the organization. Casas suggested, for example, starting a faculty meeting by having everyone take time to write a note to a student, faculty, staff, or someone else in the school.

Being connected starts with a mindset, not a workshop, said Casas, challenging attendees to reinvest in themselves in terms of how they view becoming a connected educator.

“I think we need to be careful as well. I think that very often, right now, in the world we’re living in, we think ‘connected educator’ and go right to Twitter,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve been a connected educator all my life, all my career.”

There are ways beyond social media of being a connected educator, but, Casas added, “I’m not going to ignore the tools that are available to me that could, perhaps help me become more of a connected educator and broaden that neck because I’m 44 years old and I can’t see myself changing.”

2. They give and take … and give some more

“We’re all in the giving profession as educators,” Zoul said. Citing Adam Grant’s “Give and Take,” he noted the need for balance between giving and taking, as people who are “total givers” fall on the bottom of the career spectrum alongside “total takers.”

Givers, he said, respond. They promote people and ideas, and connect people to their peers. But those at the top also take — and that they do so by stealing, not borrowing, and by looking out and not just in.

The “stealing,” he explained, is a result of leaders taking what others have done and making it unique to their own situation and scale. It’s still, however, the original creator’s idea and is used with their blessing.

3. They know it’s all about the 3 R’s (and the 3 C’s)

Being a connected educator is all about relationships, relationships, relationships, Casas said. He cited the Ed Camp that kicked off the conference as an example of a great opportunity for educators to step outside of their comfort zones and invest in their peers. “It doesn’t take seven years, five years, one year to build culture,” he said. “Sometimes it does in certain things, but guess what? You can build culture one minute at a time, too.”

When he started at Bettendorf High School in Iowa 14 years ago, his only support system to help him that first year was the building’s secretary. The profession is isolated, but at the end of the day, trading in those “islands of isolation” and moving beyond “pockets of excellence” to “networks of excellence” is on educators themselves.

An key part in getting there is by building personalized, professional learning networks (P2LNs) — and that’s an area where educators can thrive by embracing the 3 C’s (communication, collaboration, and community) via social media, weekly memos, EdCamps, FedEx Days, teacher exchanges, Google Hangouts, Skype, Voxer, and other outlets.

“The only barrier to our own learning is our own willingness to learn,” said Casas.

Source: 3 things connected educators do differently | Education Dive

 

ST. PAUL, Minn. – For the past several years, many parents in the St. Paul school district have been living in a state of anxiety over the safety of their children at school.

Now the school board and teachers union have addressed the problem of violent and inappropriate student behavior in the wording of a new collective bargaining agreement.

Based on the few details available, the plan seems to resemble the same relaxed attitude toward student behavior that led to the chaotic conditions in the first place.

It will be based on “restorative practices, which emphasize relationship building over punishing students,” according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Unfortunately for parents and other district residents, there will be no chance to review and comment on the full details of the plan before it’s approved and implemented.

That’s because the school board and union are adhering to the age-old tradition of keeping details of tentative labor contracts under wraps until they are approved by both sides.

Teachers will vote on the contract on Friday. If they approve it, details will become available to the public at a school board meeting on Tuesday.

Never mind that the tentative deal involves crucial details about how the school board and teachers plan to keep schools and students safe. Never mind that the contract reportedly involves a significant raise for teachers that’s expected to throw the district into a budget deficit.

It’s none of the public’s business until teachers give their thumbs up. By then it will too late for residents to have their voices heard.

“The district and union released some details of the agreement Monday, but neither side intends to make the contract public unless and until teachers and the school board formally approve it,” the Pioneer Press reported.

A general lack of student discipline has created a state of tension and fear throughout the district for the past several years, and has worsened in recent months.

In one week in October, several teachers were injured when trying to stop an outbreak of fights between students, a student was found with a gun in his backpack, and a student was tased by a school resource officer after disrupting a classroom and repeatedly refusing to leave.

In December, a 16-year-old student assaulted and severely injured a high school teacher who was trying to break up a fight. The teacher has since filed a lawsuit against the district, claiming it failed to provide a secure environment.

In January a former St. Paul middle school teacher also filed a lawsuit against the district, claiming she was “punched, kicked and kneed by students on several occasions and endured regular verbal harassment that was vulgar and sexual in nature,” according to TwinCities.com.

One St. Paul teacher was recently quoted across the nation after she anonymously told a St. Paul columnist that “we’re afraid.”

Many tie the situation to the district’s consulting relationship with the Pacific Educational Group, a radical San Francisco company that contracts with public schools around the nation to address “white privilege.”

According to media reports and statements from various teachers, PEG played a leading role in the development and implementation of a more relaxed disciplinary approach toward black students in St. Paul, with an emphasis on reducing the number of suspensions.

Many say that new approach has led to increasing student violence, because students know that there will be no serious consequences for their actions.

Does the new teachers contract call for another dose of the failed policy toward misbehaving students?

“The district said the agreement calls for $4.5 million in new spending on school climate over the next three years in the form of school-level pilot programs — six schools in 2016-17, nine the next and 12 the following year — to implement restorative practices, which emphasize relationship building over punishing students,” the Pioneer Press reported.

“With $150,000 each, school-level teams will be free to decide what restorative practices should look like in their buildings. Schools must demonstrate overwhelming support from staff in order to qualify for a project.

“The tentative agreement also includes a commitment to hire the equivalent of 30 full-time counselors, social workers, nurses, psychologists and teachers of English language learners — another major element of the union’s school climate proposal.”

At least one teacher spoke up and said the plan doesn’t do enough to guarantee safer classrooms and hallways in district schools.

“I do not feel that there is enough urgency for now on issues of safety and building climate. The district and Local 28 needed to make a stronger statement that change will occur districtwide, now,” Roy Magnuson, who teaches at Como Park High School, was quoted as saying by the Pioneer Press.

Nobody knows for sure whether the 30 human-service employees who will be hired will have any impact on student behavior.

A bigger question at the moment is whether the district will be able to afford them.

The new teachers contract involves a 2 percent raise for teachers retroactive to the second semester of the current school year, and another 2 percent raise that becomes effective in July.

“The pay increases will cost the district $21 million in salary and benefits over two years,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

“Human resources director Laurin Cathey said that in total, the two-year agreement will cost the district $3.5 million more than what it said it could afford heading into negotiations. That means more budget cuts are likely in the coming years.”

The last new teachers contract, ratified in 2014, caused an $11 million budget deficit. As a result, the school board was unable to keep its promise to hire 10 new employees, including five elementary school psychologists, according to the Pioneer Press.

Those positions have been rolled into the 30 new positions created in the new contract. But what if the raises cause another deficit, as predicted? Will the hiring plans be set aside again?

Beyond that, will valuable student programs be jeopardized to make financial room for the teacher raises?

Parents have no way of knowing – and no way of acting on their concerns if they did.

That’s because they weren’t allowed at the bargaining table, and the solutions to their school district’s pressing problems are out of their hands.

Source: St. Paul teachers union contract has to be approved before parents can learn what’s in it | EAGnews.org

When Catherine Lhamon, the chief of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), explained its purported Title IX authority to impose substantive new rules on colleges without a formal regulatory process, she might have hoped nobody was reading her references too closely.

Unfortunately for Lhamon, some smart folks are checking her cited case law: First former OCR lawyer Hans Bader, and now Susan Kruth of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

Lhamon was responding to a request from Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., Regulatory Affairs Subcommittee chairman, who has taken a strong interest in her office’s five-year campaign to overhaul college sexual-misconduct procedures in the absence of any notice-and-comment period.

Kruth writes for FIRE that Lhamon’s citation of the recent Supreme Court decision in Perez – on the “interpretive rule” exception to notice-and-comment – is not at all applicable to OCR’s behavior:

But in Perez, the Court wrote, “From the beginning, the parties litigated this suit on the understanding that the Administrator’s Interpretation was—as its name suggests—an interpretive rule.”

RELATED: Department of Education official bizarrely claims it’s not threatening colleges in rape disputes

In stark contrast, FIRE, Lankford, and others have argued that OCR’s “guidance” is not an “interpretive rule” because it imposed wholly new obligations on institutions—particularly the 2011 [Dear Colleague letter’s] mandate that colleges use the low, “preponderance of the evidence” standard when adjudicating allegations of sexual misconduct. Perez cannot provide support for an argument otherwise because the Court simply didn’t analyze whether the contested rule in that case was “interpretive.”

Lhamon goes on to cite a federal regulation that implements Title IX as the source of her office’s authority to require the preponderance standard. Yet the regulation on its face “does not contemplate any standard of proof,” just the requirement that schools set “grievance procedures,” Kruth said, quoting Lankford.

When Lhamon cites her office’s past “findings letters” to individual institutions under investigation, in which OCR required them to use the preponderance standard, she is arguing that

because it began enforcing this mandatory standard before publicly proclaiming it, the mandate isn’t new anymore and doesn’t have to go through the normal rulemaking process. We are unconvinced.

RELATED: Department of Education botches Title IX obligations in response to Congress, ex-official says

Recommendations made in response to “the totality of the circumstances” at a particular school are not a top-down mandate, which is what OCR seeks to justify:

Through the 2011 DCL, OCR imposed the preponderance standard on all schools governed by Title IX regardless of their other policies or circumstances.

Going back to lawyer Bader’s analysis, Kruth notes that Lhamon is conflating institutions with students when she says Title VII case law justifies the mandatory preponderance standard:

Besides the parties involved and the key questions being different, what’s at stake for the winner and loser is different in court and in campus hearings, and the procedural protections afforded the parties are different.

By defending the preponderance standard as “practicable” because many schools used it before the 2011 Dear Colleague letter, Lhamon is making the “extremely tenuous” claim that “the mere existence of policies [is] proof of their legality,” Kruth says.

And Lhamon is simply being disingenuous when she says OCR’s guidance doesn’t have the force of law, Kruth says: The 2011 Dear Colleague explicitly says schools “must use” preponderance in sexual-misconduct proceedings, “and in recent years, OCR has consistently found institutions in violation of Title IX for not doing so.”

RELATED: Senate chairman demands Department of Ed give a legal reason for dumping due process

Lhamon is talking out of both sides of her mouth when she claims that “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” is not necessarily “unlawful sexual harassment,” depending on a school’s response, Kruth says:

OCR fails to appreciate the fact that if it labels something “sexual harassment,” reasonable members of the campus community will assume it’s prohibited. Students will self-censor, and administrators will punish such speech. They already have. Expecting students, faculty, and administrators to categorize protected expression as “harassment” but not take action against it is ridiculous—and contrary to OCR’s own advice.

Kruth is talking about 15-year-old OCR guidance that tells schools they must respond to “harassment” alone – not “unlawful harassment.” OCR reiterated its ridiculously broad conception of sexual harassment in its “blueprint” agreement with the University of Montana in 2013, Kruth notes:

As FIRE and other free speech advocates noted, the agencies’ new definition encompasses a huge range of constitutionally protected expression. Disappointingly, colleges across the country are, indeed, adopting policies that mirror the “blueprint,” infringing on student and faculty rights to freedom of expression.

The more committee chairmen that pile on Lhamon’s empty justifications for her office’s five-year violation of regulatory procedures – with real and harmful consequences for students caught in the cross hairs of Kafkaesque kangaroo courts – the better.

Source: Legal analysis: Department of Education is grossly misstating its Title IX authority – The College Fix

Michael F. Shaughnessy –

1)  I understand that Reading Reconsidered: A Practical Guide to Rigorous Literacy is being released soon. What were your goals with the book?

Our goals in writing Reading Reconsidered were to capture what we have learned in studying excellent reading teachers over the past 5 years. Teachers have to balance new guidance on reading: the New SAT, the Common Core with what’s timeless and true about reading. We hoped to be able to not only de-mystify the new guidance but help teachers find a sweet spot that let them ensure success for their students (and themselves) in the long run and also the short run. Both by addressing four important and we think enduring ideas of the Common Core that transcend the implementation challenges of assessment and evaluation (text selection, writing directly from a text, close reading, and non-fiction), but also by addressing the fundamentals of reading instruction (vocabulary, habits of discussion, and how to read with students).

2)   Some people consider reading to be a “psycholinguistic guessing game” while others a set of skills. What is your view on reading?

Full disclosure, we had to google the definition and context of “psycholinguistic guessing game.” What we found was that it’s the interaction between thought and language. We don’t think that it’s necessarily one or the other. Reading is very much about forming a hypothesis (guessing) as you read, and either confirming or adjusting that hypothesis as you go. It’s about the ability to read for basic meaning (“What’s happening here? What does this mean?”) but also deeper meaning (“How does this connect to the central idea of the text? What is the author’s purpose in using this word or phrase?”). And there are certainly a set of skills that are used when reading – how to decode, how to identify the main idea, how to closely read a difficult sentence. But reading is also very much about the relationship that you form with the text – how you make meaning of what you read and use that meaning and experience to inform future encounters with other texts.

Another key aspect of reading in knowledge and experience. Some texts prepare you for certain challenges better than others. You’re not going to be able to read Paradise Lost or Pride and Prejudice—never mind the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights—if you’ve never read a text that’s more than 100 years old before. And since a reader’s level of knowledge correlates as strongly to reading success as any measure of “skills” it’s worth being intentional about thinking about how to grow and foster knowledge as we read.

3) What about reading for fun, for pleasure, for enjoyment? Can kids just enjoy reading The Three Musketeers or Harry Potter? Let’s talk about WHAT students read–and what, if anything, is wrong if a student likes Westerns or Science Fiction or Steven King? What about other forms of reading? For example–poems? Is there anything wrong with reading, for example, Clement Moore’s classic ” T’was the Night Before Christmas”? In another realm- Dav Pilkey. What is the good, the bad, and the rest about Captain Underpants

Two key issues are raised by these questions – the importance of reading for pleasure and text selection.

First, teaching students to LOVE reading is the most important thing that a teacher can do. And in so doing, we believe it’s important that students get to choose what they read for pleasure, whether it be Harry Potter, Steven King, poetry, or Captain Underpants.

Reading texts on their own allows students to practice meaning making independently and gives them opportunity to engage with a wide range of texts, especially those that naturally captivate their interest. We also believe it’s important though, to systematically expose kids to rigorous texts like those they will encounter in college.

For example, archaic texts (those written before 1950) use different syntax and vocabulary than those written today. If a student is faced with Machiavelli’s The Prince in college, but had only been exposed to current young adult fiction throughout middle school and high school, he will not have the tools necessary to be successful in making meaning of this difficult text.

Similarly, we find that the majority of texts that students are assigned to read in college is predominantly non-fiction, but the texts that students read on the path to college are mostly fiction. In our book we talk about ways of embedding non-fiction (and poetry) into the fictional texts that we read with kids in order to support comprehension of both texts, deepen appreciation, and build background knowledge.

It’s also worth noting that people often assume that kids are averse to challenging or nonfiction reading. However, with regular exposure to a wide range of texts, kids become more successful readers of rigorous texts. With that success, students begin to find pleasure in rich and challenging texts.

4) Sustained Silent Reading- How important is it in the big scheme of things?

It is necessary but not sufficient. We believe that it’s important for students to have robust opportunities to read independently. But we also think it’s important to find ways to make independent reading accountable and supportive of struggling readers. Readers who struggle to decode and make meaning independently are often inscribing these poor reading skills. So we think that you can improve on SSR for all readers, by using it in smaller chunks with a shared text, followed by comprehension questions or a writing task for students to ensure that they are understanding what they read. In addition to this accountable independent reading, we also hope that students read independently for pleasure in their down time at school and at home. In all of our schools, students have their independent reading books with them at all times so they can always read when they are done with an assignment.

5) Reading comprehension and reading for pleasure- Do you think the two ever meet in the middle?

Yes! We believe they meet in the middle in at least two key ways. The first is the importance of reading aloud to students across the grade levels (not just in early elementary!) in order to build a joyful culture of reading. Read-aloud can and should be the most joyful part of students’ and teachers’ day—an opportunity to relish and savor the beauty of books. We also see reading comprehension and reading for pleasure intersect with Close Reading, when students are given the keys to unlock the deeper meaning of a text and their eyes pop with insight, and they often experience a deeper appreciation for reading and the intentionality of author’s craft when that happens.

6) What have I neglected to ask?

We believe deeply in the power of vocabulary. Successful reading relies on a reader’s capacity to understand both a large number of words as well as the subtleties and nuances of those words, even when words change their meaning according to the setting. To have a commanding vocabulary is to master both breadth and depth. There is a difference between knowing a word generally and knowing it deeply.

Richard Cravatts –

“i-Semitism,” wrote Stephen Eric Bronner, author of the engaging book A Rumor About The Jews, “is the stupid answer to a serious question: How does history operate behind our backs?” For a wide range of ideological extremists, anti-Semitism is still the stupid answer for why what goes wrong with the world does go wrong. It is a philosophical world view and interpretation of history that creates conspiracies as a way of explaining the unfolding of historical events; it is a pessimistic and frantic outlook, characterized in 1964 by historian Richard Hofstadter as “the paranoid style” of politics, which shifts responsibility from the self to sinister, omnipotent others—typically and historically the Jews.

Long the thought product of cranks and fringe groups, Hofstadter’s paranoid style of politics has lately entered the mainstream of what would be considered serious, and respectable academic enterprise. Witness, for instance, the Facebook posts of Joy Karega, an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Oberlin College, who wildly claimed that Jewish bankers control the world economy and have financed every war since Napoleon, that Israelis and Zionists were not only behind the 9/11 attacks in New York but also orchestrated the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, and that Israeli fingerprints could be found in the downing over Ukraine of Malaysian Air Flight 17 and also in the rise of ISIS.

What troubles observers of this type of intellectual incoherence emanating from academia, is that, unlike its intellectually flabby predecessors from right-wing hate groups or left wing cranks, this political analysis comes complete with academic respectability of Oberlin, a trend that Professor Hofstadter had himself originally found noteworthy. “In fact,” he wrote, “the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”

For Karega, the archetypal malevolent Jew is found in the person of Jacob Rothschild, whose photograph she posted in December 2014, along with text, allegedly from him, stating that, “We own nearly every central bank in the world. We financed both sides of every war since Napoleon. We own your news, the media, your oil and your government”—oft-repeated tropes about Jewish domination of media and banking which suggest, to Karega and like-minded conspiracists, that Jewish wealth and influence enable Jews—and by extension Zionists and Israelis—to get away with various predations and political manipulations. She raises the specter of the Jewish banker in a later Facebook post when she blames Israel, “the same people behind the massacre in Gaza,” of shooting down the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine. “With this false flag,” Karega rants, “the Rothschild-led banksters [sic], exposed and hated and out of economic options to stave off the coming global deflationary depression, are implementing the World War III option.”

Karega’s assertions that Jews and agents of the Jewish state and high-placed government officials are manipulating current events, fomenting war, profiting from global unrest—secretive, underhanded actions whose end result would not otherwise honestly, fairly, or reasonably be achieved—this language has drawn such immediate and thunderous denunciation of Karega’s various Facebook posts, as first made public with captured Facebook screenshots in the The Tower. And it is a particularly incendiary bit of language when discussing Israel, a Jewish state, for it parallels so invidiously the classic anti-Semitic canards, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purport to reveal the intention of Jews to furtively rule and dominate the globe. Karega not only attempts to expose the hidden wealth and power of Rothschild, but she further suggests that this wealth is put to nefarious purposes, shooting down a Malaysian civilian aircraft to draw attention away from Israel’s incursion into Gaza, as well as a more deadly agenda based on “the Rothschild’s propensity for whacking scientists who dare interfere with their depopulation agenda” Karega mused, “of which AIDS is a key component,” the oft-cited, but never substantiated, libel, repeated here by Karega, that Jewish scientists introduced AIDS into the black community as an act of genocidal racism.

“The central image,” said Hofstadter, of this defective way of looking at how history works, “is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life… [The] enemy is clearly delineated,” Hofstadter observed, much in the way the Jew is depicted in the vicious forgery gaining renewed interest of late, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: “He is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving.”

As Hofstadter described it, the paranoid scholar sees the manipulator, here Jewish bankers, the Mossad, Prime Minister Netanyahu, as an enemy, one with disproportionate and unreasonable influence. “Unlike the rest of us,” however, he wrote, “the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history . . . Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he directs the public mind through ‘managed news’; he has unlimited funds. . .he is gaining a stranglehold,” in this case on world politics. Israel, and the Rothchilds, in Karega’s hallucinatory universe, symbolize Jewish power in the way that classic anti-Semitic depictions of the Jew has always depicted them: they comprise a shady cabal of omnipotent, money-hungry, unscrupulous moneymen, loyal to no single nation, willing to profit from wars and contagion, the enemies of morality, law, and virtue. Jews are at once a separate race who keep to themselves and never assimilate and adopt the host culture and manipulative insiders who penetrate host societies from within and undermine mores and economies for their own gain.

In a March 2015 Facebook post, Karega provided what she apparently thought was a helpful link to a crazed speech by Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, “Muslims for 9/11 Truth: Farrakhan on 9-11: What You Need to Know #False Flag,” in which, to no one’s great surprise, the enlightened minister ascribed the blame for the 9/11 attacks, not to the homicidal Muslim terrorists who clearly perpetrated them, but to Israel and greedy Jews who realized financial and political gains from the felling of the Twin Towers. “Farrakhan is truth-telling in this video,” Karega wrote in her post, and “we need more of us willing to venture into these areas.”

Minister Farrakhan, it will be remembered, characterized Judaism as a “gutter religion,” deemed Hitler “a great man,” and, lest there be any doubt where his sympathizes lie regarding Israel, decided that the “plight” of American blacks puts them “in the same position” as the Palestinians. So his view that Israel’s fingerprints are all over the 9/11 attacks, and that Jews in fact benefited from the terrorism, is not in variance from his twisted beliefs, nor, apparently, those of Karega.

“Now you know I’m going to be lambasted and called anti-Semitic,” he said in a 2012 Chicago speech. “They’ll say Farrakhan was up to his old canards; he said Jews control Hollywood. Well, they said it themselves! Jews control the media. They said it themselves! Jews and some gentiles control the banking industry, international banks. They do! In Washington right next to the Holocaust Museum is the Federal Reserve where they print the money. Is that an accident?”

Once professor Karega’s demented posts were made public, Oberlin’s president, already reeling from a spate of other anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish incidents on his campus, reacted fecklessly, giving the disingenuous response that the college “respects the right of its faculty, students, staff and alumni to express their personal views,” and that “the statements posted on social media by Dr. Joy Karega . . . are hers alone and do not represent the views of Oberlin College.” That may well be true, and universities do not necessarily have to take responsibility for the outrageous views expressed publicly by its faculty; but neither do academic leaders have to refrain from denouncing the same speech that a faculty member is perfectly able to utter under the protection of academic free speech, just as they regularly do in those rare instances when slurs are made by faculty aimed at blacks, gays, Muslims, Hispanics, or other perceived victim groups for who such speech is deemed “hurtful,” “oppressive,” or “hateful.”

The university campus is not the public square, where any idea—no matter how deranged, improbable, inaccurate, libelous, historically unfounded, or damaging—can be spoken and heard, unchallenged, without government interference. But while universities should, and do, protect the notion of unbridled expression and the ability to express any opinion as part of “scholarly inquiry,” it has never been the intention of academic free speech to protect, or promote, irresponsible, inaccurate, or deranged speech that is clearly outside the parameters of responsible scholarship, research, and factuality. A professor has every right to contend that the earth is flat, or that the United States is a greater terrorist threat than ISIS, or that the Holocaust never took place, or, as professor Karega has contended, that Jewish bankers rule the world and enabled Israel to orchestrate 9/11 and the Paris shootings, but the right to express such madness does not insulate an individual from the responsibility of taking ownership of his or her opinions. Nor should university leaders, while granting faculty the right to express such intellectual perversities, hesitate from denouncing them for what they are: in this case, classic anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish power and perfidy dressed up, as is often normally and sadly the case, as mere “criticism” of Israel.

All the concern and intrigue engendered in Karega’s Facebook posts show that the obvious, and easy, answers are not the ones the paranoid is likely to accept on face value. She is condemned by her nature to suffer in the labyrinthine schemes she uncovers. “We are all sufferers from history,” Hofstadter concluded, “but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

This article was originally posted on Times of Israel.

Source: The Paranoid View of History Infects Oberlin

by Richard Innes – A number of new state tests have come on line in the past four years as a result of adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Several being used in more than one state include the ACT Aspire tests, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) tests, and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) tests. Other states have adopted their own, unique Common Core tests such as Kentucky’s KPREP tests.

A key concern about all of these new tests is whether or not they provide useful information about real readiness for college and/or careers. Today, we’ll take a quick look at several of those new tests. One is the ACT Aspire where we examine results from Alabama. The other is Kentucky’s “home grown” KPREP. We use the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as the linking measurement for this analysis after presenting interesting evidence that the NAEP seems useful for this approach.

Key takeaways from this blog include:

• Grade 8 NAEP results from 2015 for Kentucky agree surprisingly well with the state’s ACT EXPLORE test scores. EXPLORE is a well-established college readiness test leveled for Grade 8 use. As in past years, Kentucky’s 2015 NAEP proficiency rates correlated rather closely to the state’s EXPLORE college readiness benchmark scores. This provides some evidence that the 2015 NAEP is useful to examine new Common Core aligned tests because Common Core supposedly is all about college and career readiness.

• In 2015 both the Kentucky-unique Common Core aligned KPREP tests and the Alabama results from the multi-state Common Core aligned Aspire tests show considerably higher proficiency rates than the NAEP reports. Given the close correlation of NAEP to Kentucky’s EXPLORE results and the much worse correlation of NAEP to both KPREP and Aspire, it appears both of these new Common Core aligned tests could be providing inflated indications of educational performance.

This first table shows the proficiency rates for Alabama’s students reported by the 2015 NAEP and the percentages of this same student group that were reported as proficient based on Aspire testing.

As you can see, the percentages of students reported proficient on these two assessments in Alabama vary considerably, with the Aspire in every case reporting notably higher proficiency rates than NAEP returned. In addition, the amount of variation was considerable across the two subjects and two grades involved. There was only a 9-point difference in the Grade 4 Reading results, but the gap for Grade 4 Math was fairly considerable at 22 points.

Keep in mind that unlike Aspire, the NAEP only tests a sample of students in each state, so there is sampling error in all the NAEP scores. Data published with the scores in the NAEP Data Explorer indicate that the possible statistical sampling errors in Alabama’s NAEP scores probably run about plus or minus 3 points. Even so, all of the differences shown in the table above exceed that sampling error.

Some might ask, is NAEP a good gatekeeper for assessment accuracy. To help answer that question this next table presents the NAEP results for Kentucky’s Grade 8 testing in 2015. I compare that to Kentucky’s own KPREP Common Core aligned tests and to Kentucky’s EXPLORE test results for 2015.

EXPLORE is another test from ACT, but EXPLORE has been around for a while and has an established track record. The EXPLORE Benchmark Scores used to generate that test’s results in this second table are linked and equated to actual empirical results from the ACT college entrance test. That empirical study determined the ACT scores that translated into good odds of passing first year college courses.

As a note, Aspire has not been around long enough to establish such a track record.

First, notice that Kentucky’s KPREP Common Core aligned tests are returning notably higher proficiency rates than the NAEP is reporting, just as we saw in Alabama’s Common Core aligned Aspire results.

Now note that the differences between EXPLORE and NAEP in Kentucky’s 2015 testing were both quite close, within 4 points in both cases. In fact, once you consider that Kentucky’s NAEP scores also have sampling errors of about plus or minus 3 percentage points, the agreement of Kentucky EXPLORE to NAEP is astonishingly close.

Thus, it looks like both KPREP and Aspire are returning somewhat inflated results compared to the NAEP and EXPLORE. It also looks like agreement between EXPLORE and NAEP has been quite good, which makes it more likely that NAEP’s cut scores for proficiency in the eighth grade are set to good values.

Data Sources:

NAEP: Main NAEP Data Explorer Web Tool

EXPORE and KPREP: Kentucky School Report Card, State, 2015

Aspire: Reading

Aspire: Math

Source: Are new Common Core tests providing inflated results? | Bluegrass Institute | February 19, 2016

BOSTON (CBS) – I know, it’s hard to take your eyes off the presidential demolition derby. But the WBZ-TV, WBZ NewsRadio, UMass Amherst Poll shows we are headed for a pretty interesting local campaign over the four initiative petition questions headed for the November ballot statewide.

Read: “On The Issues” Articles

All our findings are somewhat surprising in their own way.

MARIJUANA

The push to join the growing (no pun intended) list of states legalizing recreational possession and use of marijuana for people over 21, is, for now, approved by 53% of voters, with 40% opposed.

Given the 63% support for medicinal marijuana and dispensaries in 2012 and the 65% landslide in favor decriminalizing possession of less than an ounce, this seems a bit closer than we might have suspected, but the campaign has yet to begin.

COMMON CORE

The early margins on two education-related questions are more
impressive

.

 

The petition removing the controversial Common Core standards leads by 53% to 22%, with 25% not sure.

Read: Complete Poll Results

CHARTER SCHOOLS

And the move to raise the charter school cap leads 51-23%, with 26% unsure.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association leadership wants to pour nearly $10 million into keeping the lid on charter schools, although that is being resisted in an internal struggle. Still, you can expect both of these questions to be the focus of very public campaigning.

TAX THE WEALTHY

And finally, perhaps the most eyebrow-raising result of all: a petition to slap a four-percent tax hike on incomes that exceed $1 million to help fund schools and infrastructure is out of the gate with a wide margin – 62-percent voting yes, compared to 30-percent no, with just nine-percent unsure.

The Secretary of State’s office posts online records of ballot question results going back forty years; no tax-raising petition has passed in that time. We may be on the verge of testing the limits of the Massachusetts electorate’s anti-tax instincts.

Source: WBZ-UMass Poll: Ballot Questions On Marijuana, Common Core, Wealthy Income Tax « CBS Boston

University mental health day is the perfect time to take stock of how you’re feeling, the things that stress you out and the activities that lift your mood

It’s well-known that university can be a mental health pressure-cooker for students. Far from being the best years of their lives, many are lonely and being away from home can amplify academic, relationship and financial problems.

A survey by the National Union of Students (NUS) in December found that the majority of students (78%) had experienced mental health issues in the last year, with a third saying they had had suicidal thoughts and more than half (54%) saying they didn’t seek support.

University mental health day, founded by the University Mental Health Advisers Network (Umhan) in 2012 and supported by Student Minds, was started to encourage students to talk about their mental health and improve their understanding of how to support others.

It’s an understatement to say mental health is complicated, and there is obviously no quick fix to curing yourself of a serious problem. If you’re suffering, your first port of call should be your university’s mental health service or local child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS).

Source: Six things students can do to boost their mental health | Education | The Guardian