“When I decided to drop out of Columbia, nobody tried to stop me,” author Paul Tough says. “Columbia did not feel like it was their job to give me other options in life.”

It was December 1985, the end of his first semester of college. The 18-year-old Canadian decided to return north and continue his studies at the more affordable McGill University in Montreal. But after three semesters there, he quit college a second time.

“I was never a big fan of college. I never loved it,” Tough told me in a recent interview about his new book, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us.

Tough wasn’t sure if he could avoid returning to college and completing his degree, but one job led to another and, as he says, “I managed to never go back.”

Except now he has. For his new book, Tough spent the last six years studying American higher education in 21 states and interviewing over 100 students as well as parents, professors and admissions officers, among others.

Related: Flagship universities don’t reflect their state’s diversity

As his title suggests, the college years are vital to a young person’s future. Earn a degree and previously closed doors open. Drop out or don’t go and possibilities shrink. This has never felt truer than it does today, even if the proportion of adults (aged 25 to 64) in America with any postsecondary credential has never cracked 50 percent. The United States, at 45.7 percent as of 2016, lags behind Canada, Israel, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom on this measure.

But even if fewer than half of American adults are college graduates, earning a bachelor’s degree feels now like a necessity to many young people — because college is the new high school, practically obligatory for anyone who wants to get ahead, or at least not fall behind, in this globalized world.

In “sharp contrast to other ages and other cultures,” Tough writes, “mobility in the United States today depends, in large part, on what happens to individuals during a relatively brief period in late adolescence and early adulthood.”

For Tough, things seem to have worked out just fine, despite his lack of a college credential. After he left McGill, in 1987, he landed a job at Harper’s magazine in New York City. He was 20.

“I felt like the thing that I had been looking for in college — cool intellectual discussions, work that mattered — I felt like I got that at Harper’s,” Tough told me.

In an age when annual tuition increases routinely outpace inflation, some students, and especially some parents, find themselves asking: Is college worth it? It’s a simple question without a simple answer, Tough reminds us in The Years That Matter Most.

“It depends on who you are and where you go and what you take and how you do when you’re there and how much debt you amass along the way,” he writes. These are five hugely important variables. And even for students who attend the exact same institution — one variable — the other four factors depend entirely on the individual and his or her decisions and circumstances.

Tough’s book explores the real and terrifying idea that what you do (or don’t do) between the ages of 18 and 22 — or even 16 and 25 — profoundly shapes the course of your life. It’s no wonder that young people in this country seem to be suffering from unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression.

Related: Colleges are using big data to track students in an effort to boost graduation rates, but it comes at a cost

I see the anxiety and the depression on a near-daily basis in my job as an academic advisor to Columbia undergraduates, many of whom seem to believe that a single grade can snuff out their lifelong dreams. Between 2013 and 2018, the percentage of undergraduates at U.S. colleges who reported feeling moderate to severe anxiety increased from 17.9 to 34.4 percent, according to a 2019 study co-authored by Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University.

Over the same period, the percentage of students who reported experiencing severe depression more than doubled, from 9.4 to 21.1 percent.

I have a hard time convincing students, despite research on my side, that what subject they major in matters far less than they (and their parents) might imagine — and that what employers care about most are transferable skills, like critical thinking, that can be acquired in just about any field of study.

Tough’s book asks us to consider whether higher education in America is more an engine of, or an obstacle to, economic and social mobility. Based on his reporting, Tough thinks it’s more hindrance than help, serving to reinforce rather than reduce social stratification. But there’s also a lot of luck involved, which probably isn’t a good thing. Random chance, after all, tends not to motivate most people.

A “system of economic mobility based on luck — whether it’s the luck of which family and which neighborhood you’re born into, or the luck of what a particular admissions officer happens to see in your application on a particular day — is a system that is hard to believe in,” Tough writes.

If there’s an anti-hero to be found in Tough’s book, it’s what has long been called the “admissions industrial complex” — the organizations and processes that often determine who studies where. The College Board, which administers the SAT, figures prominently. (Note: The College Board is among the sponsors of The Hechinger Report.) So does U.S. News & World Report, the newsmagazine whose annual college rankings have an outsized influence on both high-school students and higher-education institutions. Admissions offices — along with their decisions and priorities — are also scrutinized.

“I feel like they [the College Board] have this kind of split personality, where there are a lot of people who work there who are really smart and committed to equity and want to figure out how to make the admissions system fairer,” Tough told me. “And then their financial model is based on getting as many people as possible to take the SAT, and getting institutions to take it as seriously as they can. And all the evidence seems really clear — not just now, but for a long time — that this a test that really correlates very highly with family income, and so that when colleges use the SAT as a key part of their admissions, they’re more likely to admit more rich kids and admit fewer poor kids.”

The College Board this week released a 7-page statement in response to Tough’s book, and then published a revised and expanded dissent on its website, ultimately saying that Tough “spins a false narrative that fundamentally misrepresents our mission, motivations, and impact.”

In its defense, the College Board cites two studies from May 2019 — the same month that Tough delivered to his editors the final changes to his manuscript. It seems difficult to find fault with Tough here, as he had been asking the College Board for five years to see data on whether the organization had succeeded in replicating results from a 2013 experiment by two prominent researchers, Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner. Hoxby and Turner’s research had suggested a simple $6 intervention could lead to more high-achieving, low-income students applying — and gaining acceptance — to selective colleges, where they were much more likely to get good financial-aid packages and graduate.

The College Board’s attempts to replicate the results failed. But it took the organization more than five years to acknowledge this fact.

Related: OPINION: Why the SAT ‘adversity score’ makes sense

Tough’s book is most moving and memorable in its vivid portraits of promising programs, professors and students. There’s KiKi Gilbert, an African American student from a low-income family, who realizes that all of the adversity she’s overcome could be her ticket to the Ivy League. KiKi’s story is equal parts heartbreaking and hopeful.

“It was a story they [admissions officers] wanted to hear: the homeless teen who made good. So she told it, again and again,” Tough writes of KiKi. “And telling it made her feel sad and sometimes proud, but eventually mostly angry and more than a little cynical. The whole process began to feel transactional, like she was trading her pain for college admission offers and scholarship dollars. The worst year of her life had become a commodity.”

Princeton admitted her. “And then she got to Princeton, and the value of that commodity shifted. It suddenly felt like a liability, not an asset, like something someone might use against her.”

And then there’s David Laude, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who assumes the role of “graduation rate champion.” His kitchen-sink approach dramatically increases the school’s graduation rate in short order, from 51 percent in 2012 to 70 percent in 2018. Tough told me that he found Laude’s tactics neither revolutionary nor unique — which he saw as positive news because it meant they could be replicated elsewhere. It was as straightforward as figuring out — and then removing — all of the obstacles to student success, as well as showing each student that you care and that he or she belongs on campus.

Thinking back to how not a single professor or administrator seemed to care, or even notice, when he quit Columbia in 1985, Tough told me, “I would hope that that would be different now.”

Indeed.

This story about U.S. colleges and inequality was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up here for our higher-education newsletter.

Justin Snider is a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report. He is an assistant dean at Columbia University, where he also teaches undergraduate writing.

The post OPINION: Do U.S. colleges reinforce or reduce inequality? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

“For years now,” Toni Morrison said, “I’ve been bored — bored, BORED — with evil. It’s just not interesting.”

Morrison was reflecting on her 45-year career crafting some of the most moving and important novels in American history, days before publishing her 11th and final novel, God Help the Child, in 2015.

Morrison’s comments on the banality of evil continue to echo in my mind too often these days. I could hear them just six weeks later, when a 21-year-old white supremacist entered Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and killed nine African Americans engaged in Bible study. And then again this week, after the racially motivated murder of 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.

Morrison’s fiction is often rooted in historical fact, including the bloodshed and violence that continue to mar American history. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday, September 15, 1963, that took the lives of four black girls aged 11 to 14? It’s in Song of Solomon. So, too, is the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. These brutal facts find their way into her fiction because they are inescapable parts of our history and collective identity.

I have had the privilege and pleasure of teaching Morrison’s work to high schoolers, college students and adult learners on three continents over the past 15 years. What I’ve discovered is that Morrison’s novels — as intricate and incredible as spider webs — resonate with readers everywhere, and with good reason: She is our Shakespeare.

Like the Bard, many of whose plays drew on Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles for source material, Morrison mined American history as she invented plots and peopled her stories. Generations from now, students will still be studying her works because of her language, her imagination, her themes, her characters. They are magical and transcendent, comets that zoom by once a century, blinding us with their brilliance.

Through her novels and essays and plays, we come to know ourselves and our country better; we see new things, have new thoughts, experience new feelings — through nothing more, and nothing less, than the written word.

This is why I teach her works.

Related: Why students are ignorant about the Civil Rights Movement

In Morrison, the past is almost always present. Fourteen-year-old Till might well be alive today — aged 78 — if he hadn’t been tortured and lynched more than half a century ago. His murder case, in fact, was reopened by the U.S. Justice Department last year after the white woman at whom he allegedly whistled recanted parts of her story. A memorial sign along the Tallahatchie River that marks Till’s untimely and unjust death has been repeatedly vandalized, and just last month three students from the University of Mississippi were suspended by their fraternity (though not their school) for an Instagram post that showed them posing, guns in hand, in front of the sign. Incidents like these make me wonder if we ever really learn from the past. But I remain hopeful that education — and literature — offers a path forward.

My students tend to have no trouble relating to Morrison’s vivid characters, but her writing also forces them to grapple with difficult ideas — like the notion that we can be both drawn to and repulsed by the same character, just as we can be with people we know or even with ourselves.

Song of Solomon is unusual among Morrison’s novels because its main character, Milkman Dead, is male. Morrison explained why in an interview with English professor Anne Koenen soon after the book was published:

Men have more to learn in certain areas than women do. I want him [Milkman] to learn how to surrender, and to dominate—dominion and surrender. Well, I think women already know that surrender part, and can easily learn how to dominate. But what I wanted was a character who had everything to learn, who would start from zero, and had no reason to learn anything, because he’s comfortable, he doesn’t need money, he’s just flabby and pampered. Well, that kind of character, a sort of an average person who has no impetus to learn anything—to watch that person learn something was fascinating to me as opposed to watching the man who already had that perfection.

Reading Morrison’s work has never been comfortable for me — a white male — but that’s all the more reason to read it. Literature, like all great art forms, has the power to introduce you to new universes — but also, and more importantly, to yourself. To be white and to read Morrison is to wrestle with uncomfortable truths about our ancestors and ourselves, and how racism was — is — a founding principle of this nation. To be male and to read Morrison is to witness not only the deep beauty of women’s relationships with one another but also to be confronted with the despair and destruction wrought by men’s misogyny for much of human history.

“Being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from,” Morrison told Hilton Als of The New Yorker in 2003. “It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it. It’s richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.”

She’s right. (Read her and see for yourself if you’re skeptical.)

My first encounter with Morrison was The Bluest Eye, which Mr. Kelly had assigned as summer reading for the English class I was to take with him junior year of high school, in 1993. (Months later, Morrison would win the Nobel Prize in Literature.) I found myself in a world of rape, incest and violence, a place warped by white domination and racism where a little black girl’s greatest dream was born of self-loathing: to have the bluest eyes of anyone anywhere. It was an unknown world to me. But it was a necessary world, and I needed, like Milkman in Song of Solomon, to learn about it and from it. Because it was America and our ugly past, if not also our ugly present and future.

Related: A vocational school curriculum that includes genocide studies and British literature

School boards and districts have long loved to ban books like The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, as if forbidding such works would protect young minds or actually stop people from reading them.

No.

Book bans are shortsighted and small-minded. They do nothing but reveal their champions to be ignorant of what art is and how it works.

As Franz Kafka wrote more than a century ago, the only indispensable books are the ones that bite and sting: “If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why are we even reading it? So that it makes us happy, as you write? My God, we’d be equally happy if we had no books. Those books that make us happy, we could—in a pinch—write ourselves. We need books that affect us like a very painful misfortune, like the death of someone we valued more than ourselves, that make us feel exiled to the woods, far away from humans, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

Morrison’s novels are all this and more. Indeed, they’ve never been more relevant, as we continue to confront — or avoid, at our peril — the shameful legacy of slavery and racism in the United States.

This story about Toni Morrison was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

Justin Snider teaches and advises undergraduates at Columbia University. Previously, he taught high school and college students in Europe and Asia, as well as adult learners in New York City through the Harlem Clemente Course for the Humanities.

The post OPINION: Why every English teacher should assign Toni Morrison appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

If Donald and Melania Trump were students in one of my writing classes at Columbia University, they’d be facing charges of violating academic integrity. More specifically, they’d both be accused of—and no doubt found responsible for—plagiarism. (Donald would also be brought up for fabrication and impersonation.) As a result, they’d receive Fs in my class and likely be suspended or expelled.

Instead, the Trump campaign continues to shrug off any suggestion of impropriety.

Related: Trump plan would base student loans on employability

Melania has said the speech she delivered on the opening night of the 2016 Republican National Convention was one she wrote herself, “with a [sic] little help as possible.”

That her speech borrowed extensively from Michelle Obama’s at the 2008 Democratic National Convention is now well known, thanks to Jarrett Hill, the first to surface the similarities. The Trump campaign has offered many explanations—none convincing—of what happened.

The words in question are simply “common,” campaign chairman Paul Manafort told CNN.

RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer said Melania’s words were hardly different from those uttered by John Legend and Kid Rock, not to mention Twilight Sparkle from “My Little Pony.” Spicer doesn’t seem to understand what plagiarism entails.

Under scrutiny are some 70 words in three passages, Spicer noted, implying that we shouldn’t fret over such a small number in a 2,000-word speech. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie echoed this sentiment, suggesting 93 percent originality is sufficient.

Sorry, it’s not.

A lot of the words are “common,” yes.

But what really matters is how the words are strung together, how the sentences are constructed—the syntax, as English teachers say. This is where plagiarism often becomes not just apparent but undeniable.

How a writer puts words together to form phrases and sentences is unique, especially in a language as flexible as English. Turns of phrase can function like fingerprints, a fact that helped authorities catch the Unabomber in 1996. That same year, a literary sleuth used the same approach to expose the once-anonymous author of Primary Colors, Joe Klein.

Related: How to make Cleveland great again

Melania’s crime isn’t so much reiterating ideas that others had articulated before, but rather saying the same ideas in exactly the same words with nearly identical syntax. What she did, in fact, is the same thing I’ve watched lazy undergraduates do for years: make slight alterations here and there to someone else’s words and then present them afresh, as their own.

In academia, this is sometimes called “patchwriting,” and it’s a big no-no, a form of plagiarism—more sophisticated and harder to detect than the simple cut-and-paste, but no less unacceptable. It reveals, among other things, a lack of critical thinking.

Melania took Michelle’s “the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams” and simplified it slightly, deleting “the height of” and changing “the reach of your dreams” to “the strength of your dreams.”

The hope in such a desperate move is that by changing the odd word or phrase, the writer can outwit Google searches and plagiarism-detection software. It often works. But it’s harder to hide when 23 million people are watching.

As I like to tell my undergraduates, it’s never been easier to cheat in college classes, given the technological tools and gadgets at our disposal —but it’s also never been easier to get caught. Whatever my students can find online, I can probably find, too.

Locating a transcript of Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech takes mere seconds, a fact that should give pause to any would-be speechwriter looking to crib a killer line or two. Indeed, what tipped off Hill was a single phrase in Melania’s speech—the “willingness to work for” one’s dreams—which immediately brought to mind Michelle’s words.

Minutes later, Google and YouTube confirmed his suspicions.

Related: Republicans and education: where they’ve been and where they’re going

Make no mistake: Phrases and sentences can be stolen, just like cars or computers. The theft is no less real just because words are intangible. School principals have been suspended without pay and forced out for delivering David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” graduation speech as if they had written it themselves. Politicians, in both the United States and abroad, have variously resigned, not sought reelection and had their university degrees revoked for plagiarism.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, is the man behind the brand of the Trump Institute, which provided its students dozens of pages of plagiarized instructional materials, presenting them as original. And, despite continuous claims to the contrary, he didn’t really write The Art of the Deal (hence the fabrication charge). The half-truths and deceptions go back decades and seem to know no end. A quarter century ago, Donald impersonated a (fictitious) Trump publicist in a lengthy interview with Sue Carswell of People magazine.

And Melania appears to have a fabrication issue of her own, claiming to be a university graduate. She’s no more that than Barack Obama is a Kenyan. In 2012, Donald Trump offered to donate $5 million to a charity of President Obama’s choosing if the latter would release his college and graduate-school transcripts as well as his passport records; Obama declined. Maybe we should crowd-source to offer Melania $5 million if she can produce credible evidence that she has, in fact, earned a degree from a university in Slovenia?

The lesson here is that integrity, truthfulness and transparency matter a great deal. There’s no room in the academy for plagiarists or fabricators, and there shouldn’t be in the White House either.

Justin Snider is an advising dean at Columbia University, where he teaches undergraduate writing, and a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report.

The post Donald Trump, Thief in Chief? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

What if much of what we think we know about success is wrong? What if the metrics we use in college admissions, for example, aren’t capturing the qualities of character and mind that we should actually care most about?

And what if the content of one’s character truly does matter more than anything else?

Paul Tough, a former editor at The New York Times Magazine and the author of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America (2008), has written a new book about these very questions.

In How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Tough looks at character traits integral to success—curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, perseverance and self-control, among them—and considers their relation to raising children and running schools.

The Hechinger Report spoke with Tough last week to get his take on college admissions, education reform, poverty and the Obama administration’s education agenda.

Q: To what extent does it seem like U.S. colleges are using the wrong metrics in admissions?

A: From a general point of view, I think there’s a real case to be made that at a lot different points in the education system, we are being too narrow in what we measure—that all of the measurements that we use, especially standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, are narrowly focused on cognitive skills, and what we’re finding out from a lot of different places is that non-cognitive skills—character strengths—are just as important, if not more important, in terms of kids’ success in college and beyond. But we don’t really have a good way to measure them, and so it’s that classic problem of social science that you pay attention to what is easy to measure. And it’s really easy to measure reading and math skills, and it’s much harder to measure grit and persistence and these other things.

I think there are some people who are starting to look at college admissions specifically and ways to be more creative about what colleges are considering. To get more specific, there is this research that I find really fascinating, mostly by Melissa Roderick at the University of Chicago, about how non-cognitive skills are particularly predictive not necessarily of freshman GPA in college but of college persistence.

So how do you change a system where so many colleges are obsessed with rankings?

I think it’s difficult. I think it really does have to be systemic change. To me, one thing that’s important—and I think this shift is really just starting to happen, in terms of public policy, or in terms of any given school—is looking at college graduation rather than college enrollment. In the education reform world, I think for many years we’ve really focused on getting kids to college with this understanding, or faith, that they were going to somehow graduate afterward.

And we’ve been funding them [institutions] that way, too—

Right. And it’s not true: There are lots of kids who get to college and don’t graduate. And it’s especially a problem for first-generation college students and kids from low-income neighborhoods. And that causes all sorts of problems: not only do they not end up with a B.A., but that’s when they get into real financial problems.

You can make the case that going into a lot of debt to get a college education is worth it if you end up with a B.A.—there are statistics that demonstrate that—but if you go to college for two years and don’t get a B.A., it doesn’t really pay off much in terms of future earnings and you have this huge debt. So the question is whether colleges actually care about this, and in a narrow sense—in terms of their immediate self-interest—maybe they don’t.

Is part of the problem in higher-education and K-12 policy circles that we’re myopic—and that it takes longer than we’re willing to wait to determine if something is working?

In general, yes. I think any time you’re talking about child development and public policy, there’s that problem, which is that any intervention is going to take a long time. There’s a good case to be made that the most effective interventions are early interventions, and quite literally you’re not going to see the payoff for years and years—and our political system is not set up to fund those sorts of things.

I do feel like this particular question of moving from a college-access mentality to a college-graduation mentality—that does feel more do-able to me. … I’ve been writing about education for 10 years or so, and just literally in that time, I feel like a lot of the people I’ve been writing about have just kind of woken up to this fact, that college access is not enough. When I started writing about KIPP, when I started writing about the Harlem Children’s Zone, they were both very focused on getting kids to college. And that was just their rhetoric: “Once we get kids to college, we’re done.” And I write about it in the book in terms of Dave Levin at KIPP, that literally it was that first class when they got to college, he thought they were set. They weren’t. They started dropping out. And that really made him retool his whole system. Most specifically, the division of KIPP called KIPP to College changed its name to KIPP Through College.

Many so-called “education reformers” say that poverty should not be an excuse for low achievement. Do you think that has given short shrift to poverty and also at the same time provided cover for politicians not to do anything about poverty?

I find the education reform debate in general frustrating on both sides. … I think they’re starting from this very good and accurate perspective that for a long time a lot of educators did use poverty as an excuse to say, “We can’t help these kids.” But the reaction is just as one-sided, to say that poverty isn’t going to be a factor in terms of whether these kids succeed or not.

I think that one problem this has created is it has forced us to ignore the differences in different types of poverty homes. I think education reformers have actually done a great job of creating solutions for kids on the high end of the disadvantaged population, and that’s not nothing. We have these interventions—including a lot of charter schools—that work really well with motivated kids from poor households with parents who are willing to help and support them. And that’s huge.

I don’t think, though, that these interventions work for all poor kids. And I think it would help everybody if we could admit that. Because, on the one hand, it would let us say that we do know that these interventions do work for some people. I think the anti-reform crowd just looks to say that if it doesn’t work for every kid, it doesn’t work for any kid.

But actually it does work for some kids—and for kids who don’t have other solutions, and for kids who weren’t well served before this, millions and millions of them. So this is kind of like the truce I’m hoping we can declare in the education reform fight—that if we can accept that we’ve got these interventions that work well for those kids, let’s try to expand those, replicate those, as much as possible.

But then let’s also get those same minds—instead of arguing about [whether] these work for everybody—to say, “Okay, so what does work for kids who can’t hack it in a KIPP school?”, which I think is a lot of kids, and it tends to be the kids who are in deep poverty, who are in the most chaotic families.

Right now, for almost political reasons, people like Michelle Rhee and Dave Levin and lots of other educational reformers aren’t willing to say, “We don’t have the solutions for those kids at the very bottom, but we’re going to create them.” And I think that would be a great conversation to start having because, actually, I do think those people are some of the smartest, most determined people in the education world—but I think for political reasons, it is difficult for them to say, to admit, that we’ve got the solution for some but not all.

And I think once you start putting that mindset to “Okay, how do we deal with that kid in that totally chaotic home on the South Side of Chicago?”, you start to say we need a different kind of model to educate those kids. And it can be based on the KIPP model, or other models that work, but it has to be bigger, it has to be broader, it has to be more holistic than what exists right now.

Do Harlem Children’s Zone and KIPP schools show that poverty doesn’t matter?

No, I think they show that kids who grow up in poverty can achieve great things—and that’s a big deal, that they’ve shown that. But I think they definitely don’t show that poverty doesn’t matter.

The “Promise Neighborhoods” idea was at one point going to have lots of money attached—Obama spoke of “billions” per year at the outset. It was ultimately cut back to $100 million over four years. But the Obama administration did invest billions in certain things like Race to the Top. Was that a misguided investment? Would that $4.3 billion have been better off going to something like Promise Neighborhoods?

I think so, yes. To me, I think Promise Neighborhoods is the big missed opportunity for this administration. And, absolutely, they faced a lot of obstacles—maybe it would have been impossible to get it through Congress—but I think they didn’t really try very hard to create a program like Obama described in Anacostia [a neighborhood in Washington, D.C.] in 2007.

And I think Promise Neighborhoods as he described it would have been important for all kinds of reasons. One is I think it would have actually been helping kids who would have been served directly by those programs. But I think it would also have opened up the conversation in a different way. I think Race to the Top pushed the conversation in one particular way, mostly toward teacher quality and toward how states should change their laws to evaluate teachers—not an unimportant debate, it’s a good one to have, maybe some of these reforms are heading in the right direction, but I wouldn’t say it’s the major issue in education right now in terms of what problems we’ve got in the education system.

If Promise Neighborhoods had been at the center of the administration’s education policy, I think we’d be having a conversation about what do we need beyond schools, and how do we integrate that within schools.

This interview, which also appeared on NBCNews.com, has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Q&A with Paul Tough: The Obama administration’s big missed opportunity appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Welch’s op-ed about the field of medicine could just as easily have been about the field of education (but then, would The Times have published it?). The problems besetting both are strikingly similar. In that spirit, what follows is a riff on Welch’s op-ed, and it’ll likely make sense only if you first read “Testing What We Think We Know.”

By 2010, many politicians were recommending top-down accountability to healthy schools and rigorous assessments to determine the effectiveness of older teachers. Both interventions had become standard educational practice.

But in 2020, a randomized trial showed that top-down accountability caused more problems (more teaching to the test and cheating) than it solved (fewer bad schools and under-educated students). Then, in 2029, trials showed that top-down accountability led to many unnecessary tests and had a dubious effect on school improvement.

How would you have felt—after over two decades of following your elected official’s advice—to learn that high-quality randomized trials of these standard practices had only just been completed? And that they showed that both did more harm than good? Justifiably furious, I’d say. Because these practices affected millions of American schoolchildren, they are locked in a tight competition for the greatest educational error on record.

The problem goes far beyond these two. The truth is that for a large part of pedagogical practice, we don’t know what works. But we pay for it anyway. Our annual per capita K-12 educational expenditure is now over $11,000. Many countries pay half that—and enjoy similar, often better, outcomes. Isn’t it time to learn which practices, in fact, improve our educational system, and which ones don’t?

To find out, we need more education research. But not just any kind of education research. Education research is dominated by research on the new: new tests, new technologies, new disorders and new fads. But above all, it’s about new markets.

We don’t need to find more things to spend money on; we need to figure out what’s being done now that is not working. That’s why we have to start directing more money toward evaluating standard practices—all the tests and treatments that policymakers are already pushing.

There are many places to start. Value-added assessments are increasingly finding microscopic abnormalities in the teacher lounge called M.U.T.S., or Maybe Underperforming Teachers. Currently we treat them as if they were invasive cancers, with public shaming, firing and school closures. Some elected officials think this is necessary, others don’t. The question is relevant to more than 3.5 million teachers each year. Don’t you think we should know the answer?

Or how about this one: How should we screen for underperforming students? The usual approach, standardized testing, is simple and cheap. But more and more students and parents are opting out of public schools—over five million students attend private schools alone. And 1.5 million are home-schooled. Untold thousands go to virtual schools, where they learn at home in front of computers. These options are neither simple nor cheap. Which is better? We don’t know.

Let me be clear, answering questions like these is not easy. The Department of Education is in fact preparing to take on the question of whether underperforming youngsters can be made to perform like their peers. The trial, which will involve up to 50 million students, will last a decade and surely cost billions of dollars.

Research like this takes more than grant money. For starters, it takes a research infrastructure that monitors what standard practice is—data on what’s actually happening across the country. Because of PISA, we have a clear view for students aged 15, but it’s a lot cloudier for those under or over 15. Basic questions like how common illiteracy is and what testing is done to determine rates of illiteracy are unanswerable.

It also takes a research culture that promotes a healthy skepticism toward standard pedagogical practice. That requires teacher-researchers who know what standard practice is, have the imagination to question it and the skills to study it. These teachers need training that’s not yet part of any education school curriculum; they need mentoring by senior researchers; and they need some assurance that investigating accepted approaches can be a viable option, instead of career suicide.

We have to move quickly. The administrative demands of teaching, on one side, and the competition for school funding on the other, make it increasingly difficult for teachers to instruct students. They become isolated from standard practice, and their ability to study it diminishes. School leaders who are well positioned to study these issues are increasingly directed toward enhancing productivity—questions about how can we do this better, faster or more consistently—instead of questions about whether the practices are warranted in the first place.

Here’s a simple idea to turn this around: devote 1 percent of educational expenditures to evaluating what the other 99 percent is buying. Distribute the research dollars to match the instructional dollars. Figure out what works and what doesn’t. The Institute of Education Sciences (created as part of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002) is supposed to tackle questions of direct relevance to students and teachers and could take on this role, but its budget—less than 0.003 percent of total spending on education—is far from sufficient.

A call for more educational research might sound like pablum. Worse, coming from an educational researcher, it might sound like self-interest (cut me some slack, that’s another one of our standard practices). But I don’t need the money. The system does. Or if you prefer, we can continue to argue about who pays for what—without knowing what’s worth paying for.

The post Thinking we know what we test appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In the age of accountability, measuring teacher effectiveness has become king. But it’s not enough merely to measure effectiveness, according to many leading thinkers and policymakers; personnel decisions—from pay and promotions to layoffs and outright firings—should be based on teacher-effectiveness data, they say.

The Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition brought renewed attention to teacher evaluation, as did The New Teacher Project’s 2009 landmark report, “The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness.” (TNTP’s report found that the vast majority of teachers in America—upwards of 99 percent in some districts—are rated as “satisfactory,” usually by their own principals. And such ratings or evaluations have tended to be infrequent and pro forma. That is beginning to change, however.)

Two new studies about the feasibility of grading teachers based on their students’ performance provoked a lot of discussion this week. I had a chance to be part of the conversation on January 14th with Christine Romans, host of CNN’s “Your Bottom Line,” and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union.

Romans opened the discussion by citing a remark made by John Friedman, a Harvard economist who coauthored one of the studies. Summarizing his study’s findings for The New York Times, Friedman said: “The message is to fire people sooner rather than later.”

Friedman was speaking specifically about value-added ratings of teachers—which use student scores on standardized tests to determine a teacher’s relative effectiveness—and whether they are sufficiently accurate and reliable to guide personnel decisions. His answer? An unambiguous “yes.”

I addressed this “Let’s-find-and-fire-the-bad-teachers” mentality in my comments on “Your Bottom Line,” but what I said ended up on the cutting room floor—so I figure it’s worth re-articulating here.

The problem with the approach that Friedman and others advocate is that it assumes we have all these wonderful, high-quality teachers just waiting in the wings to take over the jobs of the bad teachers we fire. In reality, there is no such supply, even in a bad economy with high unemployment. We have a shortage, not a surplus, of great teachers—and so it’s naïve or shortsighted (or both) to think we can somehow fire our way to a great educational system.

There are almost four million K-12 teachers in the United States, which is more than twice the number of lawyers and doctors combined. Teaching is America’s largest profession. And so we need teaching to be a job that an average person can do reasonably well, which means we probably need to rethink how the job is structured.

A starting point would be to look at—and reconsider—the number of hours U.S. teachers spend at the front of the classroom each week compared to the time they spend planning lessons and collaborating with colleagues. It’s no secret that American teachers spend many more hours teaching than their colleagues do in higher-performing nations. Elsewhere, teachers often teach fewer lessons each week than U.S. teachers, but they spend significantly more time on planning and collaboration.

In Finland, for example, teachers teach an average of 600 hours per year (or 800 lessons of 45 minutes each). In American middle schools, by contrast, teachers teach an average of 1,080 hours per year (or about 1,300 lessons of 50 minutes each). Perhaps we should rethink the amount of time that U.S. teachers spend teaching vs. planning vs. collaborating? A well-planned lesson, after all, is worth any number of poorly planned (or unplanned) lessons when it comes to student learning.

Now, back to what actually aired on January 14th. Here’s the video of our discussion on CNN:

A transcript of our conversation follows:

CHRISTINE ROMANS, HOST: A landmark new study from economists at Harvard and Columbia found that one good teacher can result in higher earnings, a lower chance of getting pregnant young, and a better future. Their conclusion: kids with higher test scores are kids with better teachers.

Just one year with a teacher ranked in the top five percent can mean $50,000 of additional earnings over the course of that student’s career. Imagine what four years, eight years, 12 years with a good teacher could do.

Randi Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Justin Snider is a former teacher and a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report. Thanks for joining, both of you.

This—this Harvard/Columbia study is fascinating, and one of the study’s authors told The New York Times, quote, “The message is to fire people sooner rather than later.”

Randi, we don’t—it sounds extreme. Randi, we—we don’t get do-overs with kids. Can we afford to keep underperforming students in the school? Is this study telling us that we have to do a better job of finding out—finding those underperforming teachers, rather, not students, teachers, and—and moving them to a different career?

RANDI WEINGARTEN, PRESIDENT, AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS: Well, look, I felt that the economists, the economists should do the economy and let the teachers actually do teaching. So I thought it was a very unfortunate thing to say because if you actually did that, we’d lose all of our new teachers, because the people that actually get really much better over two or three years are new teachers.

ROMANS: You don’t come in as the teacher you’re going to be the first year that you’re a teacher.

WEINGARTEN: Never. And so it was—so I thought that that was a very unfortunate thing to say—

ROMANS: The report. But do you—do you agree with the report?

WEINGARTEN: Of course—look, of course if you have—you know, if you have good performance in schools, if kids do well in school, it gives them confidence to do well in the future.

The real issue is—and—and we’ve been saying this for the last couple of years—you have to have a good performance system. We have to all be about high performance and some of the work that we’ve tried to do with evaluation, with revamping it, we’re basically taking it away from strictly being a principal’s responsibility and let’s do it together, to focus on continuous improvement.

We will ensure then that teachers are getting better. And if teachers can’t do their jobs and if you try to help them and they still can’t do it, then we have to usher them out of the profession.

ROMANS: But do you—do you agree that testing teachers, standardized testing is a way to find good students, and those students are doing better because of their teacher. That a standardized testing (INAUDIBLE), you’d like to see a different way to do it?

WEINGARTEN: No. And, frankly, testing has a role, data has a role, but the same day that that Harvard study came out, the Gates, big Gates study, came out that said you can’t just use tests. You have to use multiple measures.

And so what happens is you have to think—what you—what we need to do is we need to think about what is a teacher teaching and what is a student learning? And so, tests play a piece of that but basically so do student portfolios, so do teacher practice, so does a whole bunch of—of other things.

ROMANS: Yes. Justin, I want to ask you, the Los Angeles Times used the results of standardized tests to rate the city’s teachers there and they posted those ratings online. How much weight should parents give to standardized testing? I mean, Randi’s saying there needs to be a whole portfolio of things to judge a teacher. Standardized tests aren’t enough?

JUSTIN SNIDER, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, THE HECHINGER REPORT: I don’t think so. I think it could be a component, maybe 20, 25 percent. I think the states that are considering 50 percent as part of the evaluation system, that’s a bit scary, because there is volatility in those scores. And so a teacher who has students performing highly one year might have student with lower performance the next year.

And the thing is that parents looking for information, oftentimes this data is not coming out until after the year is over, and so the students are moving on. And I would prefer, if I had children in a school, that my students or my children were in a classroom with a teacher who I knew went the extra mile and cared and gave extra time, and that’s not necessarily going to show up in standardized tests.

ROMANS: But you can’t—you can’t choose your teacher. That’s the thing here.

SNIDER: That’s another thing.

ROMANS: I mean, the other thing is even if you know how the school ranks or how the teacher ranks, you can’t choose your teacher. And that’s a question, Randi, how do you make sure that the teacher in the classroom is one of those teachers who’s going to make your kid be the one who succeeds in life?

WEINGARTEN: Well, let’s look at what happens in countries that outperform us. They have a whole different view of this. What they do is they create a climate, which is, in some ways—

(CROSSTALK)

ROMANS: —performing teachers.

WEINGARTEN: Actually, they actually focus on creating a climate so that there’s high performance and real respect and dignity. And so what we’re saying—

ROMANS: And it’s a sought-after profession, and not everyone is accepted into—into education schools.

WEINGARTEN: Take what Justin just said about test scores. This sounds easy, but it’s so totally wrong in that teachers don’t get to decide who their kids are in school.

ROMANS: And that’s the other thing.

WEINGARTEN: And you want to make sure that a teacher is working as hard, if not harder, with a kid who needs the extra mile.

ROMANS: Randi Weingarten, Justin Snider, thank you so much.

The post How to measure teacher effectiveness fairly? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

America’s universities have long had a reputation for being the best in the world—a truth so apparently self-evident that it’s rarely been doubted or questioned. But what if the nation’s 5,000 institutions of higher education, as a whole, have fallen behind their international peers?

Indeed, there’s lots of evidence that American higher education could be doing significantly better. But how?

It’s a question The Hechinger Report set out to answer by visiting countries on three continents and examining their new higher-education agendas.

As President Barack Obama has noted time and again, the U.S. has slipped from first to 16th in the world when it comes to the percentage of our population aged 25-34 with postsecondary credentials. We’re at 41 percent, or about two out of every five young adults, according to the latest data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—and this despite the huge cost of U.S. higher education to families and taxpayers.

World champion South Korea is at 63 percent. Canada—with which the United States shares a border, yet which fares far better in this international ranking—is tied with Japan for second. Fifty-six percent of Canadian and Japanese young people hold degrees. Russia follows, in fourth, at 55 percent. So what’s going on?

Yes, the U.S. is home to Ivy League institutions such as Harvard and Yale, along with top-rated M.I.T. and Stanford. And yes, the U.S. boasts 17 of the top 20 universities in the world, according to the most recent Academic Ranking of World Universities by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Yet these institutions enroll a thin slice of America’s 20 million college students. Far more attend two- and four-year colleges, both public and private, of often-questionable quality.

And for every U.S. student who graduates, two drop out. Nearly 80 percent of those who enroll in community colleges never finish what they start.

The United States is facing a projected shortfall of 16 million college-educated adults in the American workforce by 2025 if it doesn’t change the rate at which it produces college graduates. Young Americans today will make history for being the first generation ever to be less educated, and to earn less and live less comfortably, than their parents.

With the country on the cusp of a double-dip recession, millions remain unemployed and leading thinkers are suggesting that the 21st century belongs to China and India, not America.

Why? We hear again and again that it’s because America fell asleep at the wheel.

Our series, “Lessons From Abroad,” tells the story of a once-dominant nation in danger of being left behind. We invite you to be a part of the discussion, as it unfolds over the coming months on this site, in The Washington Post and in other national outlets. The Hechinger Report will turn its attention to higher education in China, India, Japan and South Korea, as well as Canada, Great Britain and Ireland. Blaine Harden reports on Japan in today’s Washington Post. Our hope is to spark a national conversation about higher education that continues well beyond our coverage.

In their new book, That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum explain both the opportunities and the challenges facing the United States:

“To prosper, America has to educate its young people up to and beyond the new levels of technology … we need our education system not only to strengthen everyone’s basics—reading, writing, and arithmetic—but to teach and inspire all Americans to start something new, to add something extra, or to adapt something old in whatever job they are doing. With the world getting more hyper-connected all the time, maintaining the American dream will require learning, working, producing, relearning, and innovating twice as hard, twice as fast, twice as often, and twice as much” (emphasis in the original).

Our series attempts to showcase the vital lessons to be learned about how other countries get more of their students to and through college than the United States does. What works in higher education elsewhere? How are other countries increasing access and success among historically underrepresented groups? How are they maintaining quality without increasing costs, while also focusing on what students actually learn and are able to do?

More specifically, how has China doubled its higher-education participation in just the last decade—attracting students who once came to the United States for college—and how does it educate a quarter of the world’s students with just two percent of the global education budget? How has Canada increased attainment rates and integrated immigrants and native populations into its higher-education system? How has Ireland created strong linkages between its K-12 and higher-education systems?

And the most important question of all: For America to avert catastrophe and regain both its educational edge and economic dominance, how—and how urgently—must U.S. higher education change?

The post In global education race, U.S. is falling behind appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Not even bad eyesight could keep Brandon Hong from realizing his boyhood dream of flying airplanes. The 22-year-old native of San Jose, Calif., graduated from Boston University in May, and now he’s stationed at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas for pilot training. Hong won an ROTC scholarship out of high school that, together with additional aid from BU, covered almost all of his college costs. After his sophomore year of college, Hong had corrective eye surgery, and he now boasts 20-15 vision. He majored in aerospace engineering and, upon graduation, was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force.

The road wasn’t easy, Hong says. “It’s really tough to do school and ROTC. ROTC is kind of like a full-time job on top of classes. But you learn how to manage your time.” And it definitely helped that BU is “really, really supportive of the ROTC program,” Hong says. He considered other colleges with ROTC programs—including the University of California at San Diego and George Washington University, in D.C.—but their financial-aid packages weren’t as generous. Attending the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., was another option Hong weighed, but ultimately he felt the application process was too burdensome—and he wanted a more typical college experience.

Hong doesn’t yet know whether he’ll be flying fighter jets, helicopters or cargo planes—that’s determined by his performance in pilot training—but this much is clear: He’ll spend at least the next decade fulfilling his commitment to the Air Force. It’s a significant obligation, but Hong is quick to see the upsides: Not only did he avoid going out-of-pocket much for college, but he also avoided writing a resume and job-hunting his senior year.

Starting out at community college

For most people, going to college is expensive. But not going to college can be an even costlier proposition, with the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau showing that a four-year college graduate earns about 87 percent more, on average, than someone who only has a high-school diploma. At the same time, tuition increases have outpaced inflation for decades. The College Board reports that in 2010-11, after adjusting for inflation, tuition and fees at public four-year universities were 3.59 times what they were in 1980-81.

Cutting college costs has thus become a priority across the socioeconomic spectrum. The good news is there are countless ways to save money on college. The sticker price at most colleges—like the advertised price of new cars in swanky showrooms—isn’t what the vast majority of consumers actually pay. Financial aid, both need-based and merit-based, can dramatically reduce costs for many students. But that’s just the beginning of the potential savings. For some, like 2nd Lt. Hong, ROTC is the preferred route.

Another option—increasingly popular in an era where the average student graduates more than $25,000 in debt—is to attend a local community college for a year or two before transferring to a four-year institution. Tuition tends to be much cheaper at community colleges—in California, it’s $864 a year for those attending full time, compared to about $5,200 a year at a California State University campus or $12,150 within the University of California system—and students can also save on room and board by living at home.

There are other advantages to starting out at a community college, including the fact that community-college students often have a leg up on the competition when it comes time to transfer to a four-year school. For instance, roughly two-thirds of transfer students accepted by Amherst College in Massachusetts come from community colleges. At the University of Virginia, the figure is about 30 percent. And UVA goes a step further, guaranteeing admission to transfer students from the state’s community-college system if they’ve earned their associate degree within the previous two years and have a grade-point average of at least 3.4.

Earlier this year, the University of Massachusetts-Lowell said it will provide up to four semesters of free tuition toward a bachelor’s degree for students who’ve earned associate degrees (with at least a 3.0 GPA) at one of the state’s 15 community colleges. Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo offers scholarships of $6,500 over two years to transfer students from the state’s community-college system who’ve earned associate degrees with at least a 3.75 GPA.

Such opportunities were once rather rare. Students attending community college used to face a stigma, at least from the perspective of four-year institutions evaluating transfer candidates. But now admissions officers realize that such students often have shown great perseverance in overcoming adversity, and—even more importantly in the eyes of admissions officers—they’ve already proven they can thrive in higher education.

Amherst’s dean of admissions, Thomas Parker, says that reaching out to community-college transfer applicants is “another way that Amherst can make itself accessible and affordable to a non-traditional population.” The transfer students accepted by Amherst, according to Parker, are “much more likely to have had really serious life experiences, either positive or negative,” than students entering straight from high school. They tend to do well academically and get good jobs upon graduation—though Parker notes that “Amherst is a big leap” for many first-year students and transfers alike.

Monirath Siv made a similar leap in moving from a community college in Southern California to Washington University in St. Louis. He came to the U.S. from Cambodia in 2006 for his senior year of high school. Despite a limited knowledge of English, Siv learned quickly and graduated a year later as valedictorian of David Starr Jordan High School in Long Beach, Calif. His dad couldn’t afford to send him to a four-year university, so he lived at home and went to nearby Cerritos College. Two years later, Siv’s near-perfect GPA had landed him six scholarships, including one from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation that will allow him to graduate debt-free from Wash. U. in 2012.

He’s majoring in biology, with a minor in public health and an ultimate goal of earning a Ph.D. in biology from a U.S. university. In the near future, though, Siv sees himself teaching high-school biology, perhaps through Teach For America. This past summer he returned home to lead biology labs at International University in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh.

Siv is a strong believer in the nation’s community colleges, which he sees as a vital stepping stone to four-year schools for students like himself. Two years ago, he found himself defending community colleges in the comments section of a U.S. News & World Report article, “Which High School Students Are Most Likely to Graduate From College?” The article, by Kim Clark, reported on a new book about college completion co-authored by a former president of Princeton University, William Bowen. According to Bowen and his co-authors, students who start at community colleges are 36 percent less likely to earn bachelor’s degrees than similarly qualified students who start at four-year colleges.

Siv, then, is something of a statistical anomaly. He commented online that “Without community college, I might not be who I am and where I am today.” Siv also urged fellow readers to remember the second sentence of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a classic he’d read on his own while at Cerritos College: “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

Deals for out-of-state students

Historically, going to a public university as an out-of-state student has meant paying double, or even triple, the tuition that in-state students pay. At the University of Michigan’s flagship campus in Ann Arbor, for instance, in-state tuition for full-time freshmen in 2011-12 is $12,634, compared to $37,782 for out-of-state students. At the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, the difference is similarly large: $7,008 for residents versus $26,834 for nonresidents. States are able to justify such discrepancies because their tax dollars are the main source of support for public universities; it doesn’t strike many state politicians and policymakers—not to mention taxpayers—as fair to subsidize the cost of out-of-state students studying at their institutions, especially if those students are unlikely to stay beyond graduation and contribute to the local economy.

But some states, particularly in the less densely populated Midwest, have forged reciprocal agreements that give out-of-state students a break on tuition. The Midwest Student Exchange Program allows residents of nine states—Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and Wisconsin—to study at participating public institutions in any of the program’s member states for no more than 150 percent the cost of in-state tuition. Some private institutions are also part of the program, giving students a 10 percent discount on tuition. Over 100 institutions, from community colleges through research universities offering doctoral degrees, participate.

Miriah Anderson, now a senior at Missouri University of Science and Technology, will save $8,280 on tuition this year alone as part of the Midwest Student Exchange Program. A native of Olathe, Kan., which is about a four-hour drive from her school, Anderson said, “I was looking for a smaller university that still had a very good engineering program.” She found it in Missouri S&T, which is home to 7,000 students—about three-quarters of them undergraduates—on a 284-acre campus in the small town of Rolla. A mechanical engineering major, Anderson served last year as president of the university’s robotics competition team, which participates in the annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition. Anderson said she probably would have gone to Missouri S&T even without the tuition discount, but “it was definitely an added bonus.”

Graduating early

The most surefire way to cut college costs is probably to spend fewer semesters in college. Nationally, just over a quarter of students at public universities manage to graduate in four years, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. At private institutions, the figure is about 50 percent. But earning a bachelor’s degree in under four years is also possible. A handful of schools offer formal three-year bachelor’s degrees, while many more grant credit for high scores on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams.

The University of California system—which serves over 220,000 students on 10 campuses throughout the Golden State—is considering whether to offer three-year bachelor’s degrees “with pathways that make full use of advanced placement credits and summer terms,” according to a November 2010 report by the U.C.’s “Commission on the Future.”

Though three-year bachelor’s degrees seem to some observers—especially U.S. students—almost too good to be true, they’re the standard in much of the world, including the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. And in the last decade, as Europe has reformed and standardized its higher-education system, three-year undergraduate degrees have been introduced across the continent. Previously, a master’s degree was the minimum qualification offered at many European universities.

Lamar Alexander—a former governor of Tennessee, and now that state’s senior U.S. Senator—has long championed three-year bachelor’s degrees, which he calls “the higher-education equivalent of a fuel-efficient car.” He concedes they aren’t for everybody but says they should be an “option for very prepared, serious students.” Alexander has asked schools interested in implementing three-year degrees whether there are any federal impediments to doing so, and his office reports that there are no such impediments known to date.

Bates College in Lewiston, Maine has offered a three-year bachelor’s degree since 1965. Its popularity has waned in recent years, with only one or two students typically taking advantage of the option, but it remains an appealing choice for some highly motivated and focused students.

Thomas Deegan, 21, graduated in three years from Bates this past May. The mathematics major from Weymouth, Mass., said that during his second year of college, “I just kind of sat down with the handbook and wrote down all of the requirements, and noticed that I didn’t have as much left as I expected.” To graduate early, Deegan took an extra class during each of his final three semesters—at no additional cost, because Bates charges tuition by year, not per course—and he also took two summer courses at Boston University while living at home. He got credit for scoring well on his AP Calculus exam in high school, too.

For Deegan, the biggest drawback to finishing in three years—which required him to “jam all of my more difficult courses into a shorter time-frame”—was forgoing his senior season on Bates’ basketball team. It was a tough decision, but one that definitely paid off, the shooting-guard said.

Deegan’s classmate, Catherine Lary, also graduated from Bates in three years. The Camden, Maine native hadn’t planned on doing so at the outset, but an illness in her first year forced her to take a yearlong medical leave of absence. Her desire to graduate with her original class, in 2011—and to save more than $50,000 in tuition, room and board—motivated Lary to complete her studies in three years. She got credit for two AP exams in high school and then took an extra 1.5 classes each semester (the half-credit was for jazz band). Majoring in women and gender studies, with a minor in music, Lary somehow found time to write a 149-page senior thesis, “Experiences and Perceptions of Women and Gender Studies at Bates and Beyond.”

Like 70 percent of Bates alumni, Deegan and Lary both plan on going to graduate school down the road—probably an MBA for him, and a master’s in nursing for her.

Getting credit for AP and IB exams

Even at schools that don’t formally offer three-year bachelor’s degrees, it is often possible to graduate a semester or year early on account of prior credits, by virtue of AP and IB exams or dual-enrollment courses taken in high school.

The AP and IB programs are widely recognized for providing a challenging pre-college experience, and high scores on their respective exams can earn students college credit.

But while the nation’s most selective institutions want to see AP and IB courses on applicants’ transcripts, they don’t always give credit for high scores—not least because doing so would mean forgoing tuition revenues. This often means the same institutions that weigh AP and IB exams most heavily in admissions decisions—and where matriculating students have typically taken a half-dozen or more of them—are also among those least likely to grant credit for them. Neither Amherst nor Williams College, for instance, gives credit for high scores on AP or IB exams. Both schools do allow students with superior scores to place out of introductory-level courses in some departments, but earning a degree requires eight semesters of full-time study.

At a number of schools, including all eight Ivy League universities, enrolled students can apply for and receive “advanced standing,” which allows them to graduate a semester or year early. Harvard University grants advanced standing to entering students who have earned a 5—the highest possible score—on at least four yearlong AP courses. Harvard students can also graduate ahead of schedule by having earned the maximum score on three or more higher-level IB exams.

Another option for Harvard students is to finish a bachelor’s degree in three years but then stick around to earn a master’s degree in certain fields during their fourth year.

Harvard doesn’t keep track of the number of incoming students who are eligible for advanced standing, according to communications officer Paul Massari. Only about three percent of Harvard students graduate in fewer than four years—a result, Massari says, of Harvard’s rigorous degree requirements as well as its generous financial aid.

Alex Western is among the handful of Harvard students who have graduated early. The 22-year-old Atlanta native needed just three years to earn his B.A., cum laude, in economics. He says “the stars were aligned” for him to finish fast—the recession and uncertainty about family finances, coupled with a job offer he was excited about, made graduating early very attractive. He’s now working in private equity, at the Audax Group in Boston, and he imagines himself going back to school one day for an MBA. “I feel like I got the most out of my academic experience, so if I could save $50,000 by graduating early, that was a good deal for me,” Western says.

But for others—especially those who don’t fret about college costs, either because they’re wealthy or their financial-aid package covers nearly everything—there isn’t much incentive to graduate early. Lukas Toth is a case in point. The Slovak native graduated from Harvard in 2009, though his perfect score on his IB diploma would have allowed him to graduate a year earlier. (In 2005, the year Toth received his IB diploma, only 67 students worldwide—out of 27,971—got a perfect score.) Ultimately, Toth opted not to use advanced standing and graduate early because his financial-aid package covered most of his costs for four years. For families with normal assets and combined annual incomes of $60,000 or less, Harvard doesn’t charge a cent.

Taking college classes in high school

“Dual enrollment” is another, if lesser known, way to save money on college. The basic idea is for high-school students to take college-level courses that can then count toward both their high-school diploma and, later, their college degree. Often, through agreements with local institutions, dual-enrollment courses are taught on high-school campuses by high-school teachers. The material, however, is meant to be on par with what’s taught at college.

Portland State University in Oregon has been offering dual-credit classes to high-school students for 35 years. About 1,000 students a year participate from 16 high schools in the Portland metropolitan area, according to the program’s director, Sally Hudson. Students pay about a third of the standard tuition rate—in 2010-11, it was $210 for a four-credit class, discounted from $637—but study the same materials and meet the same standards as other PSU students. Classes are taught by specially trained high-school teachers who typically have at least a master’s degree in their subject area.

Hudson surveys past students annually and says about 90 percent of respondents in recent years report having received college credit, especially if they’ve gone on to attend state schools. All seven institutions in the Oregon University System, as well as all of the state’s public community colleges, guarantee credit for dual-enrollment classes.

Christian Dreyer has spent the last decade teaching dual-credit courses to his seniors at Grant High School in Portland. The South African native—who has a doctorate in English and applied linguistics—taught at the University of Pretoria before coming to the States in 1998. He sees dual-credit programs as “a powerful economic model” because they offer high-school students college-level coursework for pennies on the dollar. They also allow students to “experience in high school what real academic standards are,” he says.

Ellen Henderson, who graduated from Grant High School last June, took Dreyer’s dual-credit English class as well as another one in world history—both of which got her credit at American University in Washington, D.C., where she’s now a freshman. In deciding to take the dual-credit classes, Henderson told herself, “Maybe I should step up my skills and be prepared for college writing.” American University asked Henderson for copies of the course syllabi before awarding credit. She doesn’t have to take the standard college writing class, and she can place into a higher-level history course, too.

Rebecca Harburg, one of Dreyer’s former students, praised his English course as excellent preparation for college even though her school—Colorado College, where she’s now a junior—didn’t give her any credit for it. Harburg said, “We had a writing portfolio due right off the bat [in college], but it was elementary for me” because of her experiences in Dreyer’s class.

Samuel Bendinelli, a classmate of Harburg’s now in his third year at Yale University, said that “dual-credit classes were valuable because they developed skills demanded by colleges but seldom taught in high schools”—such as how to write a compelling 20-page research paper, complete with credible sources and proper citations.

In Iowa, Des Moines Area Community College offers dual-credit classes at no cost to high-school students across the state. DMACC has agreements with Drake University, Grand View College, Iowa State University, University of Iowa and University of Northern Iowa to ensure the credits transfer. Jay Cochran, now a junior at Iowa State majoring in mechanical engineering, entered college with almost a year’s worth of credits from AP exams and dual-enrollment courses he took through DMACC.

Phil Caffrey, senior associate director of admissions at Iowa State, says a “clear majority of freshmen” at his school enter with some form of college credit, including dual-enrollment. But the credits don’t always cut the time to graduation, he says, because they often do not fit into students’ degree programs. Also, because of the difficulty of determining just how rigorous some dual-enrollment classes are, some colleges—especially smaller and private institutions—give no credit for them.

Nathan Skurnik, who graduated in 2010 from Jericho High School on New York’s Long Island, took dual-enrollment courses there in addition to seven AP classes. The 19-year-old, now a sophomore at Emory University in Atlanta, was able to get credit from Emory for scoring well on his AP exams in biology, psychology and English composition. However, Emory granted no credit for his dual-enrollment courses—jointly offered by Jericho and two nearby colleges—in creative writing and French.

Though Skurnik could use his AP credits to finish in fewer than eight semesters at Emory, he doesn’t anticipate doing so. “I’m in no rush to get out of college,” he says. Still, he’s happy his AP credits allowed him to skip introductory-level courses at Emory. “I can go further more quickly,” he said. “I can take more interesting, smaller classes.”

Skurnik’s experience is typical: Most colleges more readily offer credit for high scores on AP or IB exams than for dual-enrollment courses taken in high school. Students can avoid disappointment by looking into different colleges’ policies on dual-enrollment courses and by ensuring that any dual-credit program they’re considering is regionally or nationally accredited. The programs at Portland State and DMACC, for instance, are accredited by the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships—which increases the likelihood that colleges will grant credit for the dual-enrollment courses they offer.

A variation on dual enrollment is being tried out in Indiana. Under a new plan proposed by Gov. Mitch Daniels, students can complete high school after 11th grade and then receive a $4,000 scholarship for further studies anywhere within the Hoosier State.

All things considered, many experts seem to agree that college is a worthwhile investment. Sen. Alexander—the son of educators, whose storied career has included stints as U.S. Secretary of Education and president of the University of Tennessee—believes that “going to college is still one of the best buys in the United States.”

He says, “You can go to a very good public university for $6,000-$8,000 per year. You can go to a very good community college for $2,000-$3,000 per year. While prices have gone up, it’s still a best buy.”

A version of this story appeared in the 2012 “Best Colleges” guide published by U.S. News & World Report on September 14, 2011.

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The American college experience has often been likened to drinking from a fire hydrant: There’s so much going on and so many new people to meet that it’s more than a little overwhelming. Ambitious freshmen tend to sign up for a full slate of extracurricular activities and the toughest classes on campus. Sleep becomes a distant dream, exercise all but forgotten. By their second semester, some students are zombies—showing up to class in pajamas, clutching cups of coffee, hoping only that the professor doesn’t take offense at nonstop yawning.

But college doesn’t have to be this way, of course. A little preparation in the summer before school and soon after your arrival on campus can set you on the path to success.

Before you start college:

1. Establish routines. It’s a truism that your brain works best when your body is well rested. However, getting adequate sleep can be a challenge, particularly freshman year. College is such a novel experience—there’s so much freedom, but also more responsibility—that you can find yourself awake at night and asleep during the day. At times, you may skip multiple meals only to binge at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Exercise, too, may become sporadic.

To avoid these pitfalls, try to establish a routine for sleeping, eating, and exercising in the weeks before you get to college. Then once you arrive, stick to it. By doing so, you may avoid getting run down or sick midway through the semester—the snare of many a freshman.

2. Read, read, read. College success is contingent on the ability to read and write well. The best writers tend to be voracious readers who soak up ideas, vocabulary, and different ways of structuring an argument or narrative. So try to get your hands on the classics you missed in high school English, as well as leading newspapers and magazines to bring you up to speed on global politics, current events, and culture.

As you’re reading, it helps to highlight important passages, make notes in the margins, and look up things you don’t know or understand. By interacting with the material, you will retain it better. Your notes will also help you later to review it more quickly. These are vital skills in college, where you may be expected to go over hundreds, or even thousands, of pages of text before an exam.

3. Learn how to cite sources. Plagiarists beware. Once you get to college, the standard for research papers goes up dramatically. Students are expected to carefully reference sources in footnotes and bibliographies, and to follow standard style guides like those of the MLA (Modern Language Association), APA (American Psychological Association), and Chicago, as required by each professor. If you Google these manuals online, you can start to familiarize yourself with them. You might also want to explore software programs like EndNote—which some colleges provide to students for free—that effortlessly store and format bibliographic information for you.

But more important than getting every colon or comma right is making sure you carefully credit all source material. Plagiarism, of course, is a serious offense. Not only is it cheating, but you can be expelled if caught. Colleges have gotten quite savvy at catching plagiarists and often use special software to help detect copied material. Some schools even have databases now where they store past student work so future generations can’t recycle it.

4. Research which courses to take. If you know any upperclassmen or recent graduates of the college you’ll be attending, ask them for advice. Many schools have publicly available course evaluations posted online by students. You can also E-mail professors before the start of the semester to ask about their class and request a copy of the syllabus. Though some faculty members may decline to provide one in advance, it doesn’t hurt to ask. If you get the syllabus early, you can get a sense of the course workload—and maybe even get a head start on the reading.

In your first semester:

1. Take a variety of courses. College is more manageable if you sign up for a variety of classes that demand different levels of work. For example, if you enroll in four reading-intensive classes in one semester, you may soon find yourself swamped by the nightly assignments. But there’s another very good reason to take a variety of courses: You might discover you’re passionate about a field you didn’t even know existed. What you decide to major in, and even what career you pursue, could be shaped by a single course or professor.

2. Speak up in class. No professor enjoys standing in front of a class and asking questions only to be greeted with silence. Speaking up is your way of showing that you’re engaged, that you’ve done the reading, that you’re genuinely wrestling with difficult concepts—and that you want to further your own understanding. Show your interest, and seek clarity when confused.

3. Leave electronic devices behind. Given the ubiquity of iPhones, iPads, and laptops, this might seem all but impossible. But recent research suggests that students learn more and get better grades when not distracted by electronic devices in class. And while many students may find typing notes on a laptop more efficient than taking them by hand, it’s also true that most find it difficult to resist checking E-mail—or Facebook, or YouTube, or Twitter—at the same time. In fact, a growing number of schools are making it possible for professors to turn off the wireless signal in their classrooms to minimize disruptions.

4. Learn to manage your time. This is spectacularly obvious and yet very difficult for most students to learn. To keep up with your assignments, you need to be disciplined. If you wait until the night before a major exam to start studying—or the day before a 15-page paper is due to start writing—of course your performance will suffer. One strategy is to break big projects down into manageable bits that you can complete one day at a time. Try writing a page or two a day over the course of a week instead of dashing off 15 pages in a single sitting.

In general, turning in assignments late is a big no-no. If you know well ahead of time you can’t make a deadline, speak to your professor. Many will be flexible and understanding if you can make a compelling case—but honesty matters. In addition, don’t expect to get an extension if you routinely cut classes or seem unengaged when you do bother to show up.

At the end of the day, college is supposed to help you expand your knowledge and prepare for life. So, it is only to your benefit to take your classes seriously. Rare is the undergrad who scores really well on exams without consistent study. Similarly, the strongest essays tend to evolve over time, as students work through multiple drafts. If you are one of those who can’t stomach the idea of revising your work, take heart from Ernest Hemingway.

When asked what led him to rewrite the final page of A Farewell to Arms an astounding 39 times, Hemingway said what had stumped him was “Getting the words right.” Like a successful college career, there’s no shortcut to that.

A version of this story appeared in the 2012 “Best Colleges” guide published by U.S. News & World Report on September 15, 2011.

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CHICAGO—“It takes a lot to be a teacher,” Luke Carman says. “Every decision that is being made, you’re simultaneously doing 17,000 other things. It requires a lot of intellectual forethought, persistence and energy.”

Carman, 23, has spent the past two years preparing for a career in the classroom through the University of Chicago’s Urban Teacher Education Program (UTEP). The Rochester, N.Y. native will complete the program tomorrow, on July 1st.

Carman could have taken a shorter route to the classroom by doing Teach For America (TFA) or a similar alternative-preparation program, but he wanted more extensive training before embarking on a job he hopes to do for a long time—if not a lifetime.

Asked how he settled on UTEP for his training, Carman says, “No matter what program you go through, there’s probably no way that you’re going to be totally and utterly prepared for any kind of experience.” But, he says, “I think UTEP has prepared me as well as I could be for anything. … I feel as supported as possible to make a career out of this and not just be in the classroom for a couple of years.”

UTEP and similar urban teacher residency programs across the country have received significant financial support from the federal government. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan hopes such programs will be a game-changer for how the nation prepares its teachers. In an October 2009 speech at Teachers College, Columbia University, Duncan minced no words in describing the current state of teacher education: “by almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom. America’s university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change—not evolutionary tinkering.”

Duncan and President Barack Obama share a sense of urgency that the United States must do much more to ensure that every student is taught by a highly effective teacher.

“To put a great teacher in every classroom,” Duncan says, “we need to dramatically improve preparation programs. We’re embracing new models—including both teacher residencies and alternative-route programs—and holding them to a clear standard of whether they’re preparing teachers who are effective in the classroom.”

UTEP began in 2003, first to prepare University of Chicago undergraduates for careers as elementary-school teachers. The program is now open to graduates of other institutions, and it prepares not just elementary teachers but also secondary teachers of mathematics and biology. This past year, there were 38 UTEP students, although the hope is to expand to about 55 slots soon. There’s also talk of one day enlarging the secondary program to include other subjects like chemistry, physics, English and history. The competitive admissions process includes a panel interview and a school visit, during which prospective students are asked to observe classes and then reflect on their observations in a group discussion.

The program takes two years to complete, though the first year is billed as part-time. University of Chicago undergraduates can begin the program in their senior year. UTEP graduates receive a Master of Arts in Teaching and state certification in either grades K-9 or grades 6-12.

To make becoming a teacher more financially feasible, UTEP offers its students a $20,000 stipend in their second year, and aspiring secondary teachers qualify for an additional $10,000 through the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program, which is run through the National Science Foundation. UTEP students are also eligible for federal Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) grants of up to $4,000 annually.

The first year in UTEP is a mix of academic coursework, guided observations of numerous Chicago Public Schools, twice-weekly tutoring of elementary or middle-school students, and a “soul strand,” which promotional materials describe as an opportunity for students “to explore issues of teacher identity and educational equity as well as the ways in which race, class, and culture affect both teachers and students.”

In the second year, teacher-interns continue with coursework, while also completing two half-year stints in a neighborhood public school and in one of the four charter schools run by the University of Chicago.

For his first clinical experience, Carman was assigned to a fifth-grade class at Donoghue Charter School on Chicago’s South Side last fall. His two mentors at the school regularly observed him and offered feedback on both lesson plans and actual lessons. Carman was also formally observed twice a semester by Bill Kennedy, a former New York City teacher who oversees the work of mentors and who coaches UTEP graduates in their first three years of teaching. Such ongoing professional support—in the form of teacher leadership training, professional-development workshops and in-classroom coaching—is a critical component of UTEP and other residency programs.

In his second clinical experience, which ran from January until May 2011, Carman taught math and language arts to seventh-graders at Rachel Carson Elementary School, where more than 90 percent of students are Latino and 99 percent are low-income.

Starting in September, Carman will be teaching sixth grade at Chicago Quest, a new charter school that will open its doors to sixth- and seventh-graders this fall. It will eventually serve students in grades 6-12, just like its sister school in New York City, Quest to Learn, which opened to sixth-graders two years ago. Both schools capitalize on digital media and technology, as well as children’s innate interest in games. “Mission critical at Quest is a translation of the underlying form of games into a powerful pedagogical model for its 6-12th graders,” the Quest to Learn website reads.

Two other UTEP students, Audrey Edwards and Danielle Haney, interned at the University of Chicago’s North Kenwood/Oakland Charter School. Both say the feedback they got from mentors—and from watching themselves on videotape—was essential to their preparation, and both believe UTEP’s emphasis on self-reflection is important.

Edwards, whose undergraduate major was in comparative human development, advises those thinking about a career in teaching “to go to a place where you’re not going to be thrown into a classroom unprepared. … Go to a place where you are able to watch good teachers.”

Haney, a 2004 graduate of the University of Iowa, adds that “observation is really important,” and cautions those considering the classroom to “make sure it’s really what you want to do—it’s intense.”

The federal government’s investment has led to the creation of teacher-residency programs around the country. Montclair State University in New Jersey, in partnership with the Newark Public Schools, started two urban-residency programs in 2010. A 12-month program is geared toward those wishing to teach secondary math or science, and it comes with a $26,000 stipend. An 18-month program prepares early-childhood and elementary teachers—who also earn special-education credentials—and those who enroll receive a $39,000 stipend. Additionally, in exchange for a three-year commitment to teach in Newark schools after graduation, Montclair State charges no tuition or fees for these programs. Graduates earn a master’s degree and state certification.

Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City is home to another new teacher-residency program. A. Lin Goodwin, its director, says programs like hers give aspiring teachers “support and space to be learners of teaching—to be deeply engaged with students at the same time that they are deeply engaged as students.” Such a structure helps ensure that “neophyte teachers are learning from children, not on them,” Goodwin says, which is a key difference she sees between teacher-residency programs and alternate pathways like TFA.

Recent graduate Jenny Field, 46, settled on the Teachers College program because it emphasized support, collaboration and a “gradual integration into the classroom,” not immediate immersion. The London native—who has turned to teaching after a career in the art world—earned her certification in special education, an area that suffers from chronic shortages of qualified teachers.

Of her student-teaching experience, Field said, “When I had a disruptive classroom, my supervisor and my mentor-teacher didn’t make me feel intimidated or nervous that it was my failing. It was understood that these are the challenges, and we had a solid support network. … Now I feel like I can really handle anything.”

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