How to Fix the SchoolsAmerica's Most Overrated Product: Undergraduate Education

A Presentation by Marty Nemko to the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, CA Broadcast on KALW-FM (NPR-San Francisco.)

You will be very tempted to disagree with me. And that's understandable. Most people who come to the Commonwealth Club have gone to college, often graduate school, probably succeeded in both, and enjoyed it in the process. So after you've spent years and lots of money on yourself and your kids to pay for college, I'm going to dare to tell you that college education is America's most overrated product? Of course you're going to want to disagree with me.

But I will ask you for at least the next thirty minutes to suspend your judgment-- and then you can disagree with me or throw tomatoes if you want.

I want to start by talking about money. I have been struck by the fact that so many parents, even those that do not have a lot of money, say,"I will spare no expense on my kid's higher education. Higher education is so important."

I've seen parents mortgage their future to pay for their kids' college education, sometimes a private college--four years at a brand name private college--when you count all outlays--almost $200,000 for four years.Even with financial aid that means not-rich people spending $100,000 PER CHILD. Even four years at a University of California campus, when you really add everything, is $100,000 for one kid. And the middle class is less likely to get financial aid at a public college, so that may be the same $100,000 per child.And the reality is - and I'm going to talk about this later -- most of them take longer than four years, so that $100,000 didn't cover it. Many students take five and six years.

Is it worth it? Parents cite a misleading statistic that colleges are very, very fond of perpetrating: "Well, I'm not so sure the learning may be worth it but the average college graduate will earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more over their lifetime than students who don't go to college."

Let's look a little more closely at that statistic, the first of a number of statistics that colleges like to talk about that-when you look just behind the ivy-aren't quite what we think they mean. Look at the pool of students that go to college. Those students, on average, are brighter, more motivated, have more education-fostering parents--so much moreso than the pool of people who don't go to college. You could take the pool of people who go to college and lock them in a closet for four years and they're going to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the other pool of people. Certainly, many employers in placing a want ad, specify that a degree is required. But in fact, a go-getter applicant can often transcend that.

But the colleges-which are otherwise very good at debunking misleading statistics-let this one lie. So, we the unassuming public say, "I'll mortgage my future so that my child can have this invaluable thing called a college education."

Let's forget about the money; let's look at the learning. Arthur Levine who is the president of Teachers College at Columbia University headed a federal panel reviewing higher education's efficacy. It released a report . The full report is at www.highereducation.org, but here I'll quote a key finding. Levine said, "Colleges love to do research, except when it comes to measuring their own effectiveness. He says, "States are spending billions of dollars on higher education and they have no idea what the results are."

We may not have hard data, but talk to nearly any employer and they say, I'm pulling my hair out. These people have college degrees yet don't even have basic writing, reading and thinking skills. What does this bachelor's degree that costs $100,000 or $200,000 certify if it doesn't even attest to basic reading, writing and thinking skills?"

Deborah Wadsworth, who is the executive director of a non-profit organization called Public Agenda, interviewed teacher education faculty--the professors who teach college graduates who have been admitted to graduate school, and who will become our future teachers. And she said 75% of the (teacher education) faculty said that their students have trouble writing essays free of grammatical and spelling mistakes. What company would survive with a product defect rate like that?

When you stop to think about it, though, it's not surprising that colleges are turning out such defective products. The predominant mode of instruction in the year 2006 is the same as the predominant mode of instruction in Socrates' time: the lecture. Why? Because, as I'm going to demonstrate again and again, colleges are a business like any other business, and the lecture is the lowest-cost way of disseminating knowledge. Now, you may say, "Marty, you're a hypocrite, you're lecturing us right now." Yes I am, because I have a total of thirty minutes with you. But when you go for a bachelor's degree, each course is fifteen weeks long, three hours per week, and you take thirty or forty courses before you graduate. There is no excuse for a method of instruction--the lecture-in which people remember only ten to twenty percent of what they hear-which is what studies of lectures have shown. They say we learn by doing. The colleges seem not to care because it's cheap to herd students into an auditorium and simply have a speck forty four rows away, pontificating to them for fifteen weeks.

Ironically, the more prestigious the college, the more likely classes are to be taught in lecture format. At the Berkeleys, the Harvards and the Stanfords, you're much more likely to be taught in a large lecture than in a local community college, which is essentially free. And who is teaching those Ivy classes? Some of the classes, although not necessarily the lectures, are taught by graduate students. Intrinsically there's nothing wrong with a graduate student except that in this country--especially in the sciences, economics, and computer science-a significant percentage of the graduate student instructors are foreign students who speak limited English-- teaching a course that is very difficult under the best of circumstances. Just yesterday somebody told me that they were taking a course and "I only understand one out of three words that this professor -- this graduate student-- is teaching." And that's the situation is at Harvard and at Stanford and at Berkeley.

Let's go beyond the half of classes at UC Berkeley that an undergraduate is likely to be taking with a TA. Let's say they actually get the vaunted professor. Are university professors really the most qualified to be teaching undergraduate students? I was speaking with a UC professor. I will change just enough of the details about her so I don't embarrass her. She has a bachelor's and a Ph.D. from Berkeley and her love, her specialty is the day and night cycles of the marigold. That is her passion: the difference between day and night growth cycles of the marigold. She really doesn't care much about teaching undergraduates the basics that they need to learn when they take introduction to biology: the Krebs cycle, photosynthesis. And yet the university, in effect, says, "You will teach undergraduate biology because that is the cash cow."

That is the vaunted professor? This woman is not a clear communicator, nor does she take much time to prepare for her classes-- it's foolish for her to do so. Why? Because all of the rewards for promotion and tenure have very little to do with teaching and everything to do with how many articles on the day-and-night cycle of the marigold she can publish. The late Ernest Boyer, former vice president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, said, "Winning the campus distinguished teaching award is the kiss of death when it comes time for tenure."

So the people who are teaching our undergraduates are often terrible choices for teaching undergraduates and we make them teach in terrible environments-large lecture classes. So it's not surprising in the most recent annual survey of college freshmen conducted by UCLA's Alexander Astin, he found that 40% of freshmen frequently felt bored in class. What company could get away with a dissatisfaction rate like that?

And students show their dissatisfaction in very interesting ways. Show up on any Day One of a lecture class at UC Berkeley and there will be 400, 500 students there. Show up toward the end of the semester, there will be half that. They vote with their feet. They essentially say, "These lectures are boring. They're a waste of time." They go and they buy the Fybate notes (lecture notes for sale). When it comes time for their term paper, the assignment often seems so irrelevant that they will go and download term papers from the internet at $9.95 a page. People are making millions of dollars on the Internet selling those term papers because students don't find the learning that comes from doing those assignments worth the effort. They'd rather pay two hundred bucks.

They vote with their feet in another way. I want you to guess: Out of every hundred freshmen who start out on an American four-year college campus -- not even two-year -- I'm talking four-year college campus, how many would you guess graduate within four years? Three out of four do not make it within four years.

Some students have financial problems and they have to work to continue going to school, so maybe they take five or six years or maybe they need to stop out or they decide to spend a semester in Europe or whatever. So, let's give them six years. What percent of students would you guess graduate from college within six years? Forty percent. Six out of ten never graduate. Again, to use the corporate metaphor, imagine a company that--out of every hundred products put on its assembly line--60 fell off the assembly line before it reached the end. How long would that company stay in business? Because we view higher education as an awesome institution rather than the rapacious business that it is, we don't think twice about it. We don't even ask that question.

But now let's look even at you, higher education's success stories. Think back for a moment to the college classes that you took. Raise your hands. How many of you have ever taken a class where there was a massive reading list that you could not get through? Look around. Nearly every person. How many of you took a class for which you didn't even read all of the required reading, let alone the recommended reading? Look around again. Nearly everybody. How many -- now be honest -- how many of you ever took classes where you never even bought the textbooks because they looked so massive. Even some of you. How many of you -- one more question about this -- how many of you ever took a class in which you forgot half of what you learned within a week of the final exam? Now look around. Everybody.

There was a letter to the editor written by Phil Hunter to USA Today that captured this beautifully for me. He writes, "Today, thirty years and four degrees later, I mostly remember the pomposity of professors who lectured in amphitheaters. They were fly specks from my perch far up in the theater, unreachable and unapproachable. They were paradigms of classic academia, dancing to a mysterious tune with their overhead projectors, while we sat in confusion, wondering what they were talking about."

One of my clients said--in passing; he was not railing about higher ed--"I got Bs and As in courses I don't even remember taking." Especially at the large universities, at the Harvards and the Stanfords and the Berkeleys, professors don't know whether you live or die, let alone whether you've learned something.

Okay, so maybe you grant me that maybe the amount of academic learning may not justify the $65,000-$135,000. You say, "Marty, but there's the social aspect." Colleges are always pounding into our heads the notion that college is the place where you make lifetime friendships, the bonding -- the halfway house between the protection of childhood and the independence of adulthood. They invoke all the romantic notions they possibly can.

Let me remind you of what more typically goes on. Fact: 27% of all undergraduate students binge drink regularly: recent study, year 2000. Why? It's understandable. You have a group of kids who are away from home pretty much for the first time. You put them into a highrise building with almost no supervision and what is going to happen?

I'm not saying we need to go back to the days of parietals-- where there's a den mother looking in at every moment. But there is something between complete laissez-faire where they're allowed to do whatever-- where 27% regularly binge drink. I can remember a client telling me about how he summarized the experience of going to college outside the classroom. He said, "Getting drunk, getting laid and going to the ballgame." And that's at Yale. I see there's a lot of you nodding.

Even more basic than what they (colleges) provide in terms of programming for students, is housing itself. The San Francisco Chronicle, which is known for genuflecting to the University of California, Berkeley-- they love it -- wrote the following, April 6, 1999: "Student frustration with the housing shortage in Berkeley escalated into a rain-drenched camp-in on the chancellor's doorstep yesterday. The campus housing crisis had a peak at the beginning of the current school year with many students forced to camp out in their cars, live in cheap motels, commute long distances, and at least in one case throw down a sleeping bag in the Berkeley BART station. The campus provides only about 5,000 campus operated beds for a student body of thirty thousand."

This is our vaunted higher education, our, quote, "national treasure."

And that brings us to the question of recruitment. Like many businesses, colleges are rapacious in their recruitment practices. This is true, by the way, even of Ivys. If you think Ivys don't need to recruit, Berkeley doesn't need to recruit, wrong. They love to tell their alumni, they love to tell US News & World Report, how selective they are. We all want to get into a country club that's hard to get into. It's the same with college--if it's easy to get into it can't be good.

Here are some of the things colleges do. Colleges are excellent at lying in statistics. They have more statisticians per square foot than anywhere else in the world and here is what they do. How many of you ever heard a college spout the following statistic: "We get twenty thousand applicants for four thousand slots in our freshman class." How many of you have heard that statistic? Nearly everybody. And what is the implication? The implication is what colleges want you to think -- they don't want you to think behind the ivy -- they want you just to think quickly. So you think, "Well, that basically means that the college admits 4,000 out of 20,000--it must be pretty hard to get into. Very deceptive and I'll explain to you why. Most students who get admitted to a college get admitted to many colleges. So they turn down most of them and only go to one. The typical college has what's called the yield rate of twenty to forty percent, that is, out of every 100 students they admit, only 20 to 40 show up. So if a college gets 20,000 applications, to get those 4,000 slots filled, they may have to admit 16,000 students. But most colleges don't want to give you that honest statistic: "We get 20,000 applicants and we admit 16,000. No. They use this very clever wording: "We get 20,000 applicants for 4,000 slots," to make themselves look selective.

Other statistics:

How many of you have heard colleges talk about the faculty-student ratio? Right? Everybody. What's the implication? I'll give you a specific example, UC Berkeley, my own alma mater. They claim a faculty-student ratio of 18:1. What is the implication of that? The implication for somebody who doesn't look behind the ivy, is that the typical class has eighteen students. What they don't tell you is that that number of faculty includes many faculty who never see an undergraduate student, faculty that either just do research or faculty that teaches only graduate students, or faculty that teach tiny classes like Indo-European linguistics that indeed has two students. The honest statistic would be, "What is the typical class size for your college's average freshman? "What is the class size for intro psychology. I guarantee you it's not eighteen. It's five hundred.

Next statistic -- and this one was reported in an expose by The Wall Street Journal. The most tangible piece of evidence about the selectivity of a college is the average SAT score of its students and that's what U.S. News & World Report uses to make its bogus rankings -- which is another topic which I won't go into today. But how do colleges get away with fudging their SAT scores? Each college will do this differently. They fudge to different extents -- but as The Wall Street Journal reported, colleges routinely will exclude subgroups that don't score high. So they will exclude transfer students, they may exclude athletes, they may exclude legacies, they may not include what they call special admits-usually minority students admitted under special criteria. So the (reported) average SAT score is not realistic. So if you, as a high school student, get a 1200 SAT score and you see that a particular college reports an average SAT of 1200, the image in your mind is that you will fit in, that you'd be an average student. But the reality is that if you counted all of the students, not just the ones that the colleges want to count, the actual average might be 1,000 or 1100. So colleges mislead students as to what the caliber of the student body actually is. (Inadvertently omitted from the speech: And that's crucial because the caliber of the student body affects the level of instruction in the classroom, the nature of interactions in the residence halls, and the quality of extracurriculars-for example, the student newspaper.)

Colleges are a business. Like any other business they want to make money, bottom line.

Now let's take a look at statistics that colleges omit. Colleges, like any other business, realize that their product has to be commercial. And one of the ways that colleges make their product commercial is by offering majors that are in high demand by students, for example, journalism, art, and fashion design. If a student receives admission into a college's program such as journalism, it would seem reasonable for the student to assume that "If I major in journalism and I do a reasonably good job, I'll have a reasonable chance of making a reasonable living at it. Otherwise, why would the college offer such a major?"

Reasonable thinking, but not real. I was sitting on a top floor of the Time-Life building a couple of years ago with a number of the editors from one of the magazines, and we were talking about this question. One of the guys said, "It is unconscionable that colleges continue to allow students to enter the journalism major programs because only a tiny fraction will ever make even a subsistence living as a journalist."

There's nothing wrong with colleges doing that (admitting students into majors such as journalism) but there's everything wrong with not telling them what the odds are (of landing a job that pays at least a living wage.) Imagine for a moment that you went to a doctor and the doctor said, I'm going to prescribe a treatment for you and it will take you four to six years to complete, and it's going to cost you $65,000-$130,000, and the doctor did not tell you that the odds of the treatment working were one in eight. What would you do? You would sue and you would win in any court in the land. And yet, colleges routinely encourage people to take the medicine called a journalism major or a music major or a fashion design major and don't tell them that the odds are one in eight, thereby committing educational malpractice. Yet because it's college, America's revered icon, we don't even question it.

More recruitment shenanigans: Even the most impersonal college, like UC Berkeley, does a great job of making you (admitted applicants) feel like you're going to have a personalized experience. The brochures (of many such impersonal colleges) show pictures of one faculty member, one adoring student looking up at him--you have this vision of one-on-one relationships. Every picture of a class has eleven students enraptured by a charismatic professor, even though the reality is that classes are huge and it's extremely difficult to get an advisor on the phone, let alone in person.

I love this one: there are a lot of marketing companies that serve higher education. And one of the tools they tell colleges to use is the following: They tell college presidents to get a list of their most desired hundred students--academic superstars, athletes and minorities. The president sits down in front of the camera with a list of these names, and says into the camera --Mary Johnson, we're really interested in having you as a student. We really hope to see you in the fall. Then they attach that little clip onto a premade videotape that the president said one time that is identical for all the students. The student gets -- what he or she believes is that individualized pitch from the president--again implying they'll have a personalized experience should they come (to that college). Students who are admitted will also get a call: a college admissions office may hire students to call all admitted students: "We're really glad you've been admitted to our college and we're excited about having you join us. It's really great." Everything possible to make it seem personalized. Then they (the students) show up on campus and there are five hundred students in a class, inaccessible advisors, you're in high rise dorms. It's nothing short of false advertising. Just like any rapacious business.

Enough of the negative. Let's move to the positive. I want to offer a blueprint for the reinvention of higher education and I want to start with recruitment since we're on that. Every college teaches ethics classes. Any college that has a school of business has a business ethics class. All I am asking is that colleges in their own business--their own admissions policy-- adhere to the very same principles that they espouse in their ethics class. Is that asking too much?

And how could colleges do that? What could be more important than choosing a college? It's the second largest purchase a person ever makes next to a home. Aren't prospective students entitled to decent consumer information? These are supposedly non-profit organizations, these colleges. I believe, instead of those glossy brochures that are the equivalent of new car brochures, we need to offer students the equivalent of a Consumer Reports evaluation on the college:

* With real statistics like candor about class size. Don't give me faculty-student ratio. Tell me what the real class size is likely to be for typical classes.

* Instead of B.S. statements about financial aid like, "We attempt to meet the full financial need of all students," let's have the facts: a chart that shows for every different income and asset category, how much cash financial aid you're going to get, how much loan you're going to get and how much you're going to have to pay out of your pocket. That way, families can really compare what it's going to actually cost to attend (College A vs. College B.)

* Let's give real graduation rates. Let's have another chart that says, "If your grade point average is this and your SATs is that in high school, here is the percentage of students who likely will graduate within four years, five years and six years." So if you had a 3.0 GPA in high school and a 1000 SAT score, based on the college's previous experience of students with those grades and SAT scores, X% graduate. That way a student, going in, knows what his or her odds are.

* When it comes time to talking about those those sexy sounding majors, let's provide the statistics:what percentage of people who graduate in journalism actually are professionally employed within a year of graduation. David Williams, a 30 year old, said to me, "You know, when I was in college I was an art major and they praised me all the time. You've got a lot of talent, Dave, and you're really good." It's ten years later -- this is a quote -- "I'm still paying off my student loans in the California College of Arts and Crafts and the closest job I've gotten to an art job is an aide to an elementary school classroom."

* The most important statistic the colleges should provide its prospective students is an index of value added: how much does the average student grow in reading skills, writing skills, thinking skills, leadership skills, public speaking skills, compared from where the kids start as freshmen versus when they graduate. If all colleges did that, students would be able to compare -- it shows how old I'm getting calling them "kids" -- they'd be able to compare the value added of one college versus another.

It's (A college education) is such an important purchase, shouldn't we be giving students that kind of Consumer Reports information? So, Plank One of my plan for college reinvention is honesty in recruitment.

Plank Two is instruction. As I said, the lecture class is a dinosaur. Instead, picture this. Imagine that you are taking a course in biology--there's 3,500 colleges in the country and they all teach intro biology. Some of the classes have great instructors, some average instructors, and some lousy instructors. And the labs in general, unless you're at a very well funded college, tend to be pretty Mickey Mouse because it's very expensive to afford good equipment. Instead of that, now imagine that every student -- rich, poor, black or white, urban or rural -- could get instruction from a nation's best biology instructor on computer, on line, interactive video, and it wouldn't be straight lecture; it would be lectures punctuated by simulations, simulations that would be impossible to duplicate in real life in a fundable lab, fascinating opportunities for kids to interact with realistic biological situations, best instructors, real interactivity at a fraction of the cost of what it currently costs to have good, bad and mediocre instructors and lousy labs. So I think the lecture class needs to be replaced by this kind of interactive instruction, video-based, online based.

Relevance, it's a word that we get tired of. But the reality is this: think back to when you were eighteen or twenty. Was that really a time in your life when you were interested in the difference between Ionic, Doric and Corinthian columns? The symbolism in Shakespeare? The music of Palistrina? The use of the Doppelganger in 19th century literature? Yet that is at the core of what we force students to learn. I'm not saying we should pander to them by teaching sex. But there's an old educational phrase that is nonetheless true called the learning moment. We need to capitalize on students' desire to learn what they're excited about and motivated to learn at that point in time. When kids are at eighteen or twenty, they're at their most idealistic. It's a great time to teach them about things that are going to foment that idealism. It's a great time to teach them about relationships. It's a great time to teach them about careers. They're understandably worried--especially if they're not techie types-"How am I going to make it?" We should not treat career as a dirty word. We need to make the curriculum more sensitive to the needs of our population.

Next, all of us would nod that the following is a good idea: we should try to look at problems from multiple perspectives. Obvious. The book 1984 was a nightmare for all of us. It was essentially brain washing from the right, non-stop. In some senses I must admit -- and I am a Democrat myself -- that colleges have become places of brainwashing from the left. We talk about the importance of multiple perspectives and seeing different views on things, but look at reading lists on most college campuses and you will see not balance. You will not see multiple perspectives. You will often see one long diatribe, often for a particular point of view and it's usually a point of view that says environmentalism is good, development is bad. People of color are good, white people are bad. Native American simplicity is good, technology is bad. There are multiple, intellectually defensive perspectives on all of these issues. If you want to really teach free thinkers, we need to allow people to hear best-made arguments for all of those perspectives. That too rarely happens.

Moving outside the classroom. Colleges need to be places that provide a moderate amount of supervision in the dorm, and an exciting living and learning environment. We need to take some of that money that we spend on football teams and country club-like campuses and divert it to things that are going to really make a difference in the lives of students. We all know that growth occurs primarily one on one, not in large lecture classes and not just from laissez faire. We need to do more to encourage peer mentoring: freshmen and sophomores being mentored by juniors and seniors, faculty/student mentoring. That is where growth occurs. We need to take money from things like country club campuses and put it where it's going to benefit students, not put it into the sizzle but into the steak.

Who is at fault in allowing higher education to get away with being this rapacious business they are without any accountability? You and I. Mainly you because I'm really trying to stop it. Because we are in awe of this mighty institution, the university, we don't see it as just another business, a business that uses undergraduates as a cash cow. We see the university as an icon.

Every time we vote "yes" on a higher education bond issue, we are saying to those businesses called colleges, "It's okay. We'll continue to take more money out of our pockets and give it to you colleges even though you produce a shoddy, overpriced product."

Every time we get a solicitation from our alma mater and we choose to take money out of our pockets to line the pockets of those businesses called colleges when there are so many more worthy charities, we are letting them get away with being unaccountable.

We must be smarter than that. And our media and our government must be smarter and start treating colleges as they treat other businesses. We should certainly demand from them the same degree of accountability as we would, say, a car company. When the Ford Motor Company produced the Pinto, the media was relentless in attacking Ford. They lost many millions of dollars. And yet colleges produce defective products day in and day out in huge quantities -- students who either don't graduate or if they do graduate-- they graduate without basic skills, yet we simply genuflect before them and increase their funding.

Every one of those proposals the federal government has recently enacted, the Hope Scholarship, the Lifetime Education Credit--who's paying for that? You are. And it doesn't go into the pockets of the consumer. Why? Because when the colleges know that there's more financial aid available from the Feds, what do the colleges do? They raise their tuition. Did you know that in the 90s, colleges' endowments have doubled and tripled-- Harvard is the most vivid example. In 1990 their endowment was three BILLION dollars, already a huge sum. Their endowment now is twenty billion dollars. And what did they do with this extra money? Did they rebate it to the students? No. They increased their tuition, and not only did they increase it, they increased at more than the level of inflation.

Colleges have been left to go unaccountable and like any other business, they will make as much money as they can. We should demand at least as much accountability as you demand from PG&E. When PG&E wants to raise the price of a kilowatt a penny the Public Utilities Commission holds a massive hearing. It's on the front page of The Chronicle -- there's a freeze right now. PG&E can't raise the price a penny despite the energy crisis. And yet colleges--we don't blink twice. We simply bow down to them because they're our icon. Colleges require similar oversight to PG&E.

Colleges produce a shoddy, overpriced product and it's time we held them accountable. Only by holding them accountable and not revering them as we would an icon can we even hope that colleges can improve from being America's most overrated product to becoming the national treasure that we believe it is. Thanks a lot for not throwing tomatoes.

Q. What about smaller colleges such as Reed in Portland, Oregon, and St. John's, Annapolis?

A. Excellent question. The smaller colleges vary more. Some small colleges do a great job. St. John's is probably among the very best because it indeed does have eleven students per class and an excellent faculty totally dedicated to teaching. It's one of the hidden treasures of higher education. It has a campus in New Mexico as well as the one in Annapolis. It's a truly wonderful institution. I have mixed feelings about Reed and the other schools that are its peers, the Oberlins and the Williamses and the Swarthmores, because they, while twenty years ago, did a fine job of providing undergraduate education, like other colleges, have tried to emulate the most prestigious ones--the research universities. They have become more and more research oriented, so there is less personal attention. I think they're (small brand-name private colleges) are (generally) better but they're so darn expensive -- they are $200,000 for four years and one wonders whether it's worth it. And here's another interesting point, I believe. Sometimes class size isn't the whole picture. I was at Pomona College recently and I walked into classes and there were ten or twenty students in a class and yet the professor was lecturing most of the time. It doesn't matter that there are ten or twenty students in the class if the professor is acting as though there were 400. So it's not just a matter of class size. It's a matter of having professors that are masters at interactivity and I'm not sure that today's professors who are so research obsessed, who are trained, hired, and rewarded for research, are masters at interactivity. So I have mixed feelings about that. But St. John's: wonderful school.

Q. I'm Bruce James, Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Sierra Nevada College, and one of the aspects of American higher education that is unique in the world is our system of lay governments, of having boards of trustees that are not involved with the institution--very important that they aren't. In many ways, what you're saying is an indictment of that governance. What would you suggest the trustees ought to be doing to help solve these problems?

A. I think that the boards of trustees are invaluable but they are being stonewalled by university administrations. They too often act as rubber stamps. Boards have to be more activist. College presidents are the slickest guys in the world. I've been a consultant to many to them. They are silver tongued devils, and they make their reports and they get their minions to give silver tongued, wonderful, glowing reports, and board members in general ask palliative questions, questions that make nice, and ask for little, small changes. If you ask hard questions about value added, if you ask hard questions about how they select their professors, if you ask hard questions about the use of interactivity in instruction, if you ask hard questions about alcoholism, I dare say that the boards could do a heck of a lot of good, but I don't see many boards acting that way at all. I think boards are invaluable but they need to be activist groups.

Q. Having gone to Berkeley, I can certainly agree with a lot of what you say about Nobel prize winners and about political correctness. But I'd actually like to ask you a question on another subject and that's the overall social value. It's occurred to quite a few of us that the community really gets quite a benefit from the long time students spend in college because these students in college are available to work part time at very low wages for five, six, seven, ten years, whereas if they got out of high school and went right to work, then companies would have to pay them more money. And this is a great benefit to McDonald's and Starbucks and so forth.

A. That is an excellent point. Students really represent slave labor, not only off campus but on campus. It is amazing. In their classes, universities are among the most strident advocates for labor, and yet in their own labor practices, they are often utterly dishonorable: they will hire people at 49% percent time to avoid paying them benefits. So many lecturers, called gypsy professors, teach one class for an amount of money you can't even begin to make a living on, struggle. They drive around from San Jose to Berkeley or wherever and make $18,000 a year with a Ph.D.--all because colleges, rather than hire a full time person they have to give benefits to, would rather be unethical and save the money. Colleges are businesses like any other business.

Q. It's hard for me to accept that colleges are a business and I find it very difficult to understand when you say that what the university delivers to the nation is not worth it. I completely disagree because there is much more to education than preparing for a job. I have two Master's degrees and I know that neither one of them prepared me exactly for the job I took over. But it was invaluable and this is what the college is all about. Of course, they are much too expensive, much too expensive. But it's not a business and the student is not the product. Thank you.

A. I couldn't agree more the college must be more than career training, absolutely. But they don't even do a good job of training good citizens and connoisseurs of life. You don't become a good connoisseur of life when you are lectured to by a professor who is hired, promoted and rewarded based on research. You need people to teach students who are masters at teaching and masters at interacting with young people. I'm really glad you asked the question because absolutely, we don't need just career training institutions. We need to train citizens and connoisseurs of life, without question. If only colleges did it, I would be right with you.

Q. Well, I'll be the devil's advocate. There are other aspects of the learning experience and you touched on some of them. What goes on in the classroom may even be secondary to what goes on in the larger environment of the university. And if you immerse a student in the university environment, in the better universities, in the colleges, the Grinnells and so forth, maybe they're having a bad experience in the classroom -- in most of those smaller schools they're not -- but even in the universities, the plethora of activities that are going on are tremendous. And of course, if they're not trying to appreciate that then it's lost on them. But it's there in spades.

A. Absolutely. The amount of extracurricular choices-- like the music programs and the opportunities for photography and other activities -- are terrific. My big problem out of the classroom is in the residence halls.

Q. I would also cite what I call the W effect where -- you know, the old boys' network. When you go to certain schools if you take the strict economist view that you're going not for the learning but for who you get to meet along the way, along life's path, then you better go to the better schools. And that's what people are paying for. They're paying for those connections. And then the last point I'd make is that these schools are maybe secondarily training programs for students. They're primarily knowledge factories and you can critique them on what kind of knowledge they turn out with these journals that mean nothing at all. However, that's a different kind of critique than yours.

A. With regard to colleges being primarily knowledge factories and secondarily careerist, I'm fine with that, too-- if they did a good job not just of inculcating facts but encouraging really good critical thinkers. If they did a good job of that, no problem. I'm not trying to turn these places into career factories. They should be primarily places to teach critical thinkers and connoisseurship of life, secondarily career. But they do a lousy job of it because of who they choose to hire and promote and by the fact that they're educating in the cheapest way, the lecture class.

Q. I agree with every word you've said tonight and I'm wondering how I can recapture the donation I made this morning to my prestigious university.

A. Stop the check.

Q. My question, though, is to what extent are you a voice in the wilderness and to what extent are you a harbinger of some movement which may actually have an effect on this really defective institution that we so revere?

A. I'm going to be completely candid with you. I'm a voice in the wilderness. A few people have written books about this. But the problem is that most people who know are insiders and they have too much invested. They're part of the institutions, they're faculty members, they're administrators and they don't want to become pariahs. Chance brought me outside of higher education. I've been blessed in being able to write newspaper columns and radio and TV shows, and all this other stuff. So I've been able to have a life outside. So I have nothing to lose by being honest. Ernest Boyer is dead so I can be candid -- at this point it's not going to hurt his career. He was the vice president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a real expert on higher education and he and I had some long talks about this and he said, "Marty, I only wish that I could do what you're doing. I can't. My whole life -- my friends, my colleagues, my life is tied in with this higher education establishment. I simply am not willing to pay the price of being a pariah." And that's why: I'm one of the few who is lucky enough to have nothing to lose by being honest. Almost nobody from the inside is.

Q. Thank you. And I am one of those. I came here because I heard about you. I'm an elected trustee. I own an electronics company in the South Bay and I'm on the community college board of trustees. Now we're in California. Talk a little bit about the educational master plan because as I try to fight what's going on, there's a turf battle that exists.

A. Right.

Q. Why not have the community colleges as freshmen and sophomore classes.

A. I'm with you.

Q. We consider it the K-14 system in California system in California. Community colleges are funded that way--it allows the students a chance to sow their oats and figure out where they're going, whether they want occupational ed or whether they want to continue on to external (academic?) ed. The question I have asked my employees, "Do you think our organization can fail and, if so, what is the ramification for you?" My employees understand very clearly that our business can fail and therefore they work in ways to make it better. That's not necessarily true of my employees at the educational institutions. As a matter of fact, they look at seniority as the way to go. Any ideas, suggestions, on the educational master plan as well as the tenure program?

A. First of all, I completely agree that the master plan should really give primacy to the community college for the first two years of college. The faculty is much better geared for it. With regard to the second point, why is it that colleges don't have a strong incentive for improvement? It is partly tenure. Once you get tenure, you can't lose your job. There are some perfectly wonderful professors who, when they got tenure, were worthy of it, but as we all get older we start to get bored or tired or even physically not well. And yet we continue to be allowed to teach and teach and teach, damaging students four hundred at a time. So I think that part of the problem-I'll be that in your business--not one of your employees have tenure. You can't say that about a university.

Q. Hearing you, I found it new that certain minds in the university that are out to get the money no matter what, Could you comment on that?

A. I have been a consultant to a lot of colleges, and privately behind closed doors -- of course, I won't mention individual names -- almost everybody is obsessed with money: department chairs are obsessed with money, admissions people are obsessed with getting more students-- to meet their number -- just like in any corporation. You talk to a college president-he's mainly worried about development. Fundraising, building the endowment, more grant money. The professors who get promoted are the ones who bring in the dollars. College is a business like any other business. I don't think it always was that way. I think it's gotten worse. In the fifties or forties, I don't think it was that way. There's a lot more pressure now. I think this is unfortunately an accelerating trend. A lot of former teaching-oriented colleges, undergraduate oriented colleges, are moving to become more research oriented. The state universities, even here in California -- started out a hundred years ago as teachers' colleges with no research expectation at all. But little by little, especially over the last thirty years, a lot of them have gone from teachers' colleges to regular colleges and now they call themselves universities and are very much attracting research types and have rewarded research types, and the undergraduate is getting the short end of the stick more and more. That's why I deeply believe that today undergraduate education is America's most overrated product.

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/americas-most-overrated-product-undergraduate-education_id1234

How to Fix the Schools (abridged)

Imagine that Michael is your son. He’s entering the 9^th grade but is reading on a 7^th grade level. He complains that school is hard and boring. He refuses to do most of his homework. He is starting to make bad friends.

You now hear about the latest school reforms: he will now be in classes with the school’s top students as well as its weakest ones. Standards will be ratcheted up so all students will be required to take a full college-preparatory course schedule, and each of those courses will be more demanding than ever before. Three hours of nightly homework will be the expectation. Even if class size is reduced, will such school reform likely help or hurt your Michael?

Michael, except for the name, is a real kid. He’s the child I’ve been mentoring for the past five years. And I’m worried as hell about what school reform is doing to him.

Here’s a blueprint for school reform that I believe is more likely to help Michael, indeed all children.

Better Teachers

It’s ever more difficult to attract and retain good teachers. Before the women's movement, many of the best and brightest females saw teaching as the most ambitious career to which they could reasonably aspire. Today, however, we don't blink twice at a woman executive, doctor, or lawyer. Indeed, 49% of the law school class of 2004 is female. As a result, the quality of K-12 teachers has severely declined. We must reinvent the way we recruit, train, and retain teachers.

Recruiting Better Teachers

We can attract better teachers by improving teacher prestige, pay, and impact.

Prestige: Teaching would be more prestigious if we added a career ladder for teachers: teacher, senior teacher, master teacher.

Pay: Even if teachers’ per-hour pay remained the same, if teachers worked an eight-hour day and 220-day year, teachers would earn $70-100K, enough to eliminate low pay as a reason to eschew a teaching career. That pay structure would also discourage the many people who are attracted to teaching primarily because of the short hours and summers off. Requiring teachers to work a longer workday and work year would also benefit students—more time on task does bring about more learning.

Impact: Would teachers be more likely to stay in teaching if classes were grouped by achievement rather than the current hodgepodge, and if teachers regained more power to place too-difficult-to-teach students into special classes?

Reinventing Teacher Training

It is difficult to imagine why university professors rather than K-12 master teachers are the designated trainers of K-12 teachers. Most university professors are researchers, rarely master K-12 teachers. Many have never taught K-12 at all. And because so many professors are hyperintellectual, enjoy esoterica, and are more comfortable with data than with children, there’s particular reason to doubt that they are the best people to train K-12 teachers.

University-based teacher training programs have no such incentive. Their main incentive is to fill its seats. No matter how weak the teachers they turn out, the university suffers little negative consequence. The incentives are all for quantity, not quality.

The following approach to training teachers would seem to make more sense. Each school district should recruit bachelor’s degree holders for a teacher training program taught primarily by the district's best teachers. Each trainee would spend a few weeks in each of those teachers' classrooms, and after school, debrief with those teachers. The district would supplement that practicum with methods and theory courses, the latter perhaps taught by university professors.

The school district, after certifying the new teacher, would have to hire that teacher. That provides a strong incentive for the district to ensure good screening and training of candidates.

Even if the above recommendations were in place, to attract enough good teachers as a result, we must stop acting like educators—who usually disdain marketing. We must undertake a marketing campaign about “The New and Improved Teaching Profession” aimed at top high schoolers, college students, and mid-career professionals. If the Army’s “be all you can be” campaign could convince people to spend years in the muck while risking having their heads blown off, marketing “The New and Improved Teaching Profession” should attract sufficient numbers of our best and brightest into teaching.

Better Curriculum

Think back to the last class or workshop you attended. How much do you remember? If you’re like most people, not much. And that was when you were an adult, you chose the class, and perhaps paid for it.

Now imagine school kids, especially the millions of unmotivated ones like Michael. They must endure class after class on topics they never would have chosen: European history in the 4^th grade, pre-algebra in the 8^th, or chemistry in the 11^th. And each class is no mere one-hour workshop; it’s a 180-hour marathon. And kids have shorter attention span than adults. It’s little wonder they forget, let alone fail to incorporate into their lives, most of what they were taught.

Children have so much curiosity, so much energy. Yet most schools, even most well-funded suburban schools, have long managed to leach the life out of so many kids. One parent wrote, “I waved good-bye to my bright-eyed kindergartner. Now I say hello to a dulled fourth grader.”

And by high school, the dulling usually accelerates: geometric theorems, the causes of the War of 1812, the periodic table, the subjunctive tense, fat textbook after fat textbook—material that could deaden the most vibrant teen, let alone Michael. If you ask teenagers—suburban, urban, or rural--what they think of school, their most frequent responses: “boring” and “Why I need to know that stuff?”.

This is especially devastating to the millions of slow learners like Michael. By definition, they’re going to leave high school knowing relatively little. That makes it crucial that what they do learn be as important as possible. Until every student has acquired the basic life skills, it is elitist of us to insist that they understand non-linear functions, the electron structure of the elements in the Periodic Table, the pre- and post-Columbian explorers’ voyages, etc., etc., etc.

Lest you think I exaggerate, here’s an example of the state of New York’s objectives for all its students: “Students relate processes at the system level to the cellular level in order to explain dynamic equilibrium in multi-celled organisms.” Let’s cross the country. Here’s a sample item from the exam that every high school student in California will be required to pass: “What is the prime factored form for the lowest common denominator of 2/9 + 7/12.” That was an item rated as of average difficulty! Could you answer it? In your entire life have you ever needed to know this? Even if you’re a scientist, you probably will never need to know that.

Forcing all kids, even slow learners, to know such things—even if they graduate without decent reading, writing, and arithmetic skills--is what we’re endorsing whenever we nod in agreement when some educrat or politician calls for “high standards for all students.” Is that what you would want for Michael?

Why do we continue to teach the things that even good students usually forget the day after the test? Mainly it’s tradition—schools change at glacial speed. But it’s also because curriculum is developed by scholarly Ph.D.s who value their discipline so much that they insist that every bit of arcana is indispensable. And because we would hate to appear as though we were defending low standards, we accept the scholars’ recommendations.

What to Do?

We must ask ourselves: What are the most important things kids need to learn? We must teach those first. Reading, sure. Number sense, yes. Writing, of course. How to use a computer. Sure. Interpersonal communication skills, absolutely.

What might a reinvented high school curriculum look like?

Roughly ¼ of traditionally required high school courses would become elective, replaced by required life-skills courses as follows:

English/Language Arts

Of the four-years of high school English, roughly three are currently devoted to the study of literature. One year of that literature work would be replaced by this course:

Language for Life. Using common real-life situations, this course would develop students’ ability to make logical and well-presented arguments orally and in writing. The course would also focus on enhancing reading of crucial material such as newspapers and magazines, voter handbooks, consumer contracts, employee and product assembly manuals, and how-to books.

Students entering 9^th grade would be able to test out of this course and in its stead take a more advanced course in research, rhetoric, and in written and oral persuasive communication. Debating, mediation, and brainstorming sessions would be often used as vehicles for teaching these skills.

History/Government

One year of the typically-taken four years of history/government would be replaced by:

Psychology for Life. Using common real-life situations and extensive use of role-playing, this course would help students develop new understanding and skills in such areas as conflict resolution, coping with anxieties, teasing/cliquishness, drug abuse, and sexuality.

Math

One year of the typically-taken four years of college-preparatory math (algebra, geometry, algebra 2/trigonometry and precalculus) would be replaced by:

Math for Life. Many students graduate from high school able to solve the problems in the Algebra 2 textbook yet unable to deal with more common real-world math problems, for example, to address the question, “Can I afford to buy a home?” This requires an understanding of how to set up that problem, calculate likely mortgage payments, estimate likely income (after taxes) over at least the first few years of home ownership, etc. The Math for Life course would use common real-life scenarios to teach crucial math understandings that are lacking in a surprising number of high school and even college graduates.

Students entering 9^th grade would be able to test out of this course and in its stead, take a more advanced math course.

Science

One year of the typically-taken four years of science would be replaced by this course:

Information Literacy. The information explosion provides tremendous power to those who can harness it. This course would show students how to optimally use the Internet, libraries, and interviewing to obtain desired information.

Foreign Language

One year of the typically-taken three years of foreign language would be replaced by:

Career Exploration. Even after college, many people graduate unsure of what they want to be when they grow up. Part of the reason is that they are aware of only a small fraction of the thousands of career options available. Even fewer people have a good sense of what career would best suit them. It normally takes years to identify a well-suited career. High school is the time to begin the career exploration process. This course would not attempt to pigeonhole students into a career. It would expose them to a wide range of options, use various methods to identify each student’s strengths, weaknesses, values, and interests, and show them how to discover what careers might fit them. Non-college-bound students would be exposed to quality non-dead-end careers not requiring a college education.

Create a National Curriculum

Imagine what would be possible with a national curriculum. For every major concept, K-12, there could be a superlative lesson plan. Consider the classic frog dissection lesson. Instead of killing millions of frogs, a high-quality interactive video-based course (too expensive to develop locally, but affordable nationally), distributed on the Internet, would allow students to simulate the frog dissection. Click on an icon and you get a mini-lecture or demonstration by a nationally renowned teacher. A lesson plan would be included for the in-classroom teacher, including stimulating questions, group activities, and homework assignments. Why should 70,000 biology teachers each have to try to figure out a wonderful way to teach the frog dissection lesson, not to mention bring in and then kill 30 frogs per period?

An additional benefit of a national curriculum: The nation is wringing its hands about the lack of minority teachers to serve as role models. There certainly would be no difficulty finding a few outstanding minorities to do the pre-recorded mini-lectures and demonstrations for these online classes.

Now think about the entire biology (or English, history, whatever) course. A similar course could be developed for each of those.

Importantly, this approach would allow for a degree of individualization impossible without a computer. Students could proceed at their own pace, getting more or less help as they need it. This would be invaluable for Michael.

The cost of developing master-taught courses locally is prohibitive, but not if there were a national curriculum, with course development funded by the government or public/private partnership and created by the best curriculum developers.

What would the hundreds of thousands of live teachers do if online master teachers were doing the teaching? They would do what they do best: provide the human touch: answering questions, working one-on-one with kids, and developing the close relationships with students that most of us wish we had but few teachers have time to provide.

When we think about what we remember most fondly about school, it’s usually relationships. We must give teachers the time to build one-on-one relationships with students. I predict that if we freed teachers to do that, teachers would enjoy their jobs more, kids, especially those like Michael, would feel more connected to their teachers and to their school, and the schools would get a badly needed injection of a crucial ingredient in the best environments: love.

Commonality-centered, not ethnicity-centered curriculum

Today’s curriculum tends to divide people. It encourages students to self-identify more by their ethnicity than by their commonalities as fellow human beings. Conventional wisdom still is that by teaching kids to celebrate their ethnicity, we increase the self-esteem of people of color and we all will come to value diversity. Unfortunately, we are learning that when groups identify themselves primarily by their differences rather than by their commonalities, severe problems occur, witness the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, Albanians and Serbs, Hutus and Tutsis, for example.

One way to assess the success of schools’ current efforts to encourage interracial relations is to observe whom students choose to sit with in the student cafeteria. Walk into the cafeteria in most racially diverse high schools, and you’ll mainly see students eating with students of their own race.

Berkeley (California) High School makes particular efforts to encourage students to take pride in their ethnicity, A PBS TV special on Berkeley High documented how the students had so balkanized that not only do most students self-segregate in the cafeteria, each ethnic group has staked out and named its own turf on the schoolyard: Africa, Little Mexico, Asia, etc. Interracial fights are frequent.

What to Do? In our schools and in the media, it would seem that we should focus less on our separate group identities and more on our commonalties as humans on the planet. We should emphasize our obligations to contribute not to "our community" but to the world we all share. If we are to slow our descent into separate ethnic enclaves, each with its "what's in it for us" philosophy, we need less pluribus and more unum.

Better Structure

Reforming school structure isn’t sexy but it’s one of the most certain ways to improve student learning.

Increase Time on Task

The research shows, and it’s only common sense, that the more time spent learning, the more that students will learn. Yet the average school year in the US is 179 days. Compare that with England: 192 days. Canada: 195. Russia: 208. Germany: 240. Japan: 243. China: 248. That means that American kids spend 26 weeks a year in school compared with, for example, 35 weeks in Japan. With a difference like that, it would be a miracle if Japanese kids didn’t outscore US kids. There’s no miracle.

Now let's look at the length of the school day. The average US student spends only 5.6 hours a day in school, only 70% of which is devoted to instruction: there’s homeroom, lunch, PE, recess, etc.

Even some of that 70% isn’t used on instruction. Too many teachers don’t consider time the valuable commodity it is. They may routinely start class late (“We’re waiting for a few students.”) and end early (“Well, there are only five minutes left in the period, so you can start on your homework.”) So our kids get perhaps 8,000 hours of instruction over their entire K-12 school career to learn the ever-growing amount of material we throw at them. That’s just 77 eight-hour days per year!

Students should spend 220 eight-hour days in school. With the involving curriculum described above, most kids, even Michael, won’t mind the longer school year. That must be our goal: to make school pleasurable enough that kids are glad it’s a school day. We must think big.

Restore Achievement-Grouped Classes

Imagine you wanted to start learning Spanish. Would you sign up for a class that had beginners, intermediates, and fluent Spanish speakers in the same class? Of course not. Yet, that’s how we increasingly group classes K-8 and even in high school. Do you really think Michael will learn more and have higher self-esteem in classes with high school hotshots, where his low achievement will stand in stark relief?

High achievers fare even worse in mixed-achievement classes. In the past, there were classes for gifted children so they didn't need to be held back while waiting for slower children to learn. Today, however, able students are now usually relegated to mixed-achievement classes, where they too often are bored, and spend much time helping that student who is—figuratively or literally-- still struggling to read Dr. Seuss. Learning to help others is beneficial, but too often denies able students of their right to learn. How short-sighted: a student has more ability so let's not teach her more, let's have her help the weak students. That’s a path likely to reduce everyone to a lower common denominator.

The common sense of grouping classes by achievement is supported by an impressive body of research, largely suppressed because of it would result in Asians being over-represented in higher-level classes and African-Americans over-represented in lower-level classes.

A survey of 1,164 teachers nationwide, conducted by the non-partisan research group, Public Agenda, found that despite hearing years of anti-achievement grouping rhetoric, 7 in 10 remained in favor of the practice.

Opinions are one thing, but what about data on the effectiveness of achievement-grouped classes? A University of Michigan report summarized the result of 76 separate studies on the impact of grouping by ability, and found that they resulted in higher achievement for average and above average students, and was no worse for below-average students. In short, mixed-achievement classes help no one.

Done right, teaching is among the most difficult jobs: directing the intellectual, emotional, and social development of 20-plus kids at a time. Even physicians, among our most respected professionals, deal just with the physical health of just one person at a time. Yet with the current policy of having slow and gifted, well-adjusted and violent kids, immigrant non-English speakers and top native English speakers, all in the same class, we have created a classroom challenge that is nearly impossible for all but the most talented and workaholic teachers.

So why are the nation's schools racing to abandon achievement-grouped classes and instead put slow and gifted in the same class? Mainly it's because America's religion is changing from meritocracy to egalitarianism—treat everyone equally, even if the results are worse as a result. It’s ironic that many of the leading champions of diversity insist on one-size-fits-all education.

What to Do? Here, we don’t need pilot tests. The evidence is clear. We must restore achievement-grouped classes. We must, however, ensure that, unlike in previous incarnations of achievement grouping, that the groupings are fluid—students who show promise must be given an opportunity to move up and those who struggle consistently should move down. That way, all students are more likely to get appropriate-leveled instruction.

To help ensure race-fairness, particular efforts should be made to ensure that children of color are assigned to appropriately leveled classes. To additionally help ensure that an elite is not created and that students get to interact with diverse schoolmates, non-academic subjects should probably not be grouped by achievement.

At the high school level, we must create a high-quality program for non-college bound kids like Michael. It must not be like the dumping-ground vocational education of decades past, in which non-academically oriented kids spent their days in shop classes acquiring obsolete skills. We must create small, family-like career tracks in our high schools, in which students learn real-world survival skills in the context of in-demand careers. For example, in a health careers track, students could be taught crucial reading, communication, relationship-building, math, and science skills by applying them to various health careers. That concrete context makes the material easier to understand, reveals the real-world relevance of the material, and gives students an edge in landing quality, in-demand jobs that don’t require a college degree.

Balance spending on high- and low-achieving students

On top of the regular per-student allocation, we spend additional money for each low-achieving student, and thousands of dollars per student on top of that if the student is one of the now 8 percent of all students identified as a special education student. A school district may well spend an extra 1,000 percent each year for students with a severe disability—for example, students who sit and rock all day—with little expectation that they will improve significantly.

Why do we do so? Mainly, because parents of special education children and their lawyers are often relentless in trying to get whatever they can, without regard to what it takes from the school budget. The lawyers know that the schools will usually agree even to outrageous demands rather than face the extensive and expensive litigation required by law. An additional pressure for the school district to capitulate is that it doesn’t want to risk lawyer-spun stories appearing in the media: “Hard-Hearted District Snubs Handicapped Child.”

In contrast with the thousands of extra dollars spent per special education student, most school districts spend less than $100 a year on each gifted student, those with greater ability to contribute to society. It’s a myth that able kids “will do just fine” without special attention. The world is filled with unsuccessful able people.

Over the past 30 years, a trillion taxpayer dollars have been spent on extra funding for low-achieving students and schools. Yet many studies, notably the definitive study of Title I by top evaluation consultancy, Abt and Associates, finds no evidence that the money has resulted in greater achievement, let alone in closing the gap between the intellectual haves and have nots.

What to Do? Restore the balance in spending between those with the greatest need and those with the greatest potential to profit.

De-emphasize self-esteem programs, reemphasize grades

Among industrialized nations, American students score near the bottom on achievement tests, but are #1 in self-esteem. Conversely, Asian students score highest yet have the lowest self-esteem.

This is not a coincidence. If you have more than moderate self-confidence, it takes the edge off feeling that you need to work hard. In contrast, if your self-confidence is only moderate, you are at least a little worried that your work won’t turn out well. Your only chance, you believe, is to work hard.

Most successful people, when beginning a project, are usually uneasy about whether they’ll be able to do it well. This is even true of icons of success we’d think were brimming with self-esteem. For example, after his election to the presidency, George Washington wrote in his diary: “About 10 o’ clock, I bade adieu to Mount Vernon . . . with a mind oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express, and set out for New York . . . with the best disposition to render service to my country, but with less hope of answering its expectations.”

I am a little uneasy as I’m writing every sentence of this article. If my mindset was, “I’m competent, I can do this, no problem,” I’m convinced that my work wouldn’t be as good. I wouldn’t work as hard. It’s ironic that self-esteem, so often promulgated as the cure for low achievement, can cause it.

Because education pundits and pop psych gurus so heavily push self-esteem-building, teachers are ever more de-emphasizing grades. The argument goes, “If we give grades, we risk lowering kids’ self-esteem.” Yet common sense tells us that we need external rewards such as grades for our work. For example, if people didn’t get paid, most people—except perhaps those with unusually satisfying jobs--wouldn’t drag themselves out of bed in the morning and into the stresses of the work world. Yet kids’ “salary”—their grades—has been eliminated in many elementary schools. And in most high schools, the meaning of grades has been reduced--standards have been lowered so much that students routinely receive Ds, Cs, and even Bs, even though they understand little of the course material.

Though it may dismay idealists, few students study because they love learning, especially with today’s ever more difficult curriculum. They study mainly for the grade, and in high school, because some teens still suffer from the delusion that they won’t get into a good college without good grades. Yes, admission to the nation’s 100 brand-name colleges is difficult, but admission to most of the rest of the nation’s 3,500 colleges is surprisingly easy.

What to Do?

True self-esteem doesn’t come from self-esteem programs; it comes from accomplishment. If a kid can’t succeed academically, he shouldn’t be given misleading praise or grades. Instead, meaningful activities must be found at which he can succeed. For example, I’d want Michael in a high-quality vocational program.

Teachers should, where possible, emphasize the positive, but not if it will induce unearned complacency or unrealistic expectations. I have heard too many barely literate high schoolers say that they plan to be doctors and lawyers, spend years struggling down that primrose path, and years later and poorer, realize they were misled.

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/how-fix-schools-abridged_id1245

The Truth About College: A Book Proposal

CONCEPT: Like many teenagers, I was led to believe that college was one of our nation's most worthy icons. But over the next 35 years, I've come to see college in full dimension: as student, counselor to college bound students, career counselor, professor specializing in the evaluation of education, and consultant to college presidents. And I've come to the conclusion that a college/graduate school education may be America's most overrated product.

The Truth About College will prove that contention using my experiences over the 35 years plus research data and my clients' and colleagues' stories. As important, the book will offer recommendations for policymakers on how to reform, even reinvent higher education and offer recommendations to
students (including the many adult students) and parents on how to make the most of the system as it is.

Most readers of non-fiction have spent years and grand sums on college and graduate school, for themselves and/or for their children. I believe that
having invested so much in higher education, many people will enjoy reading an insider's account.

PART I: COLLEGE ADMISSION

CHAPTER 1: COLLEGE AS MEDIEVAL CHURCH. Colleges paint themselves as like the medieval Church, receiving thousands of eager supplicants but only able to offer dispensations to a fortunate few. Fact is, 95% of American colleges are more like car dealers: doing whatever it takes to get customers to take a test drive, and subtly overselling to get them to sign the loan documents.

Supported by interviews with admissions "counselors," this chapter will demonstrate how colleges use marketing techniques that would do Madison Avenue proud.

CHAPTER 2: REINVENTING COLLEGE ADMISSION.
This chapter will urge colleges to use a more Consumer Reports-like approach to marketing themselves. The chapter will urge, for example, that colleges stop using notoriously misleading statistics, for example, the ubiquitous "Student/Faculty Ratio."
Even at large universities, this number is usually around 20:1, misleading unsuspecting prospective students into thinking their typical class will
contain 20 students. Colleges concocted the student/faculty ratio statistic so they can include faculty who teach courses like "Advanced Indo-European Linguistics" which may have an enrollment of five, even though almost no students, let alone undergraduates, take that course. Worse, the student/faculty ratio often includes faculty who don't teach at all--who just do research. A more appropriate statistic would look at the class size for popular introductory and advanced undergraduate courses.

CHAPTER 3: MAKING THE MOST OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM.
This chapter will describe strategies that enable a college-bound student or parent to get the straight scoop about a college. For example, request a copy of the college's most recent student satisfaction survey. If the college sends it, you learn a lot about the college. If the college refuses to or says it doesn't bother to conduct student satisfaction surveys, you've also learned a lot.

PART II LEARNING IN COLLEGE

CHAPTER 4: SELECTIVE MEMORY.
On their website and brochures, colleges forward romantic notions of the joys of learning. Indeed, many of us, looking back recall the good classes. But when one examines ALL the hours spent in the classroom and on studying and papers--and identifies the amount of valuable learning retained, the story is usually quite different. So much time is spent listening to interminable lectures, reading voluminous arcana-filled texts, and in discussions and tests in which students must parrot back the professor's odd world view or risk a lower grade. This chapter will vividly document the problem. Some of it would be humorous, if it weren't true.

CHAPTER 5: REINVENTING UNDERGRADUATE ACADEMICS.
The core of the problem lies in who's doing the teaching. People who choose careers in the professoriate, on average, are deeply intellectual, enjoy delving into esoterica, and usually lack charisma. These are hardly the people best suited to teaching undergraduates.

Worse, their doctoral training trains them to ever narrow their professional interests, fills them with mounds of trivia little of which an undergraduate
needs, yet provides little training in the art of pedagogy. Not exactly the best training for the teachers of undergraduates.

From this crop, who gets hired to be a professor? Usually the candidates with the best potential for publishing in abstruse journals. Teaching, even
at many colleges that are supposedly undergraduate-oriented, still emphasize research expertise over teaching ability.

Tenure puts the final nail into the teaching coffin. As Ernest Boyer, the late Vice President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching said, only half-joking, "Winning the Campus Distinguished Teaching Award is the kiss of death for tenure." To get tenure, you usually must spend most discretionary time on research, not teaching.

In short, professors, as a group, are remarkably ill-suited to the task of teaching undergraduates.

This chapter will propose a new university position: the Teaching Professor,--people specifically hired to teach undergraduates. The chapter will also advocate a post-hoc solution for existing professors: a teaching boot camp.

CHAPTER 6: MAKING THE MOST OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM.
Despite colleges' and universities' tendency to prioritize research over teaching, some of these institutions do a better job of undergraduate education than others. This chapter will show college-bound students and parents insiders' ways to assess the quality of teaching on a campus.

One example: The standard advice is to sit in on a class. That's useless because an individual professor could be the campus star or the campus joke. Better yet still simple is to walk down the halls of a busy classroom building, perhaps one in your intended major, stand in the doorway of perhaps ten classes, and ask yourself, "Would I like to be in this class?" Observe the students: Do they look engaged or about to fall asleep?

When you're enrolled, take advantage of excellent but rarely promoted options such as independent studies. These are one-on-one courses, studying
what you want with the professor of your choice. Independent studies are rarely promoted because they are costly to colleges.

PART III: EXTRACURRICULARS

CHAPTER 8:IN LOCO PARENTIS.
Campus extracurricular activities aren't crucial for most adult students, but are much valued by traditional-age students. Younger students envision--aided by colleges' brochures and websites--vibrant living-learning experiences filled with fascinating encounters and mind- and heart-expanding adventures. Fact is, in today's laissez-faire college environments, a top recreational activity is getting plastered--a national study found that today, 27 percent of all undergraduate students binge drink regularly. Colleges are fully aware that when you stuff into a dorm hundreds of 18-year-olds, many of whom are living away from parents' watchful eyes for the first time, you have a situation ripe for alcohol and drug abuse. Yet too many colleges just offer a student a quick alcohol/drug awareness workshop and for the next four years do little more than wink at the problem.

CHAPTER 9: REINVENTING EXTRACURRICULARS.
I'm certainly not calling for a return to the parietals of a bygone era, when a den mother would keep students on the straight and narrow. But innovations such as a richer program of dorm-based extracurriculars with carefully chosen peer and professionals coordinating, would go a long way to address the problem.

CHAPTER 10: MAKING THE MOST OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM.
Most colleges offer a host of extracurricular options particularly likely to be rewarding: working at the campus radio or TV station, on the student activities board (the body that decides what concerts and lectures are to be brought on campus), becoming a student member on university-wide committees. These are little-known and can make the difference between a mediocre and outstanding college experience.

PART IV: GRADUATE SCHOOL

CHAPTER 11: EVEN MORE HALLOWED, EVEN MORE OVERRATED.
Especially in a tight job market, more and more people figure they'll go back to graduate school to ride out the downturn, picking up a career-enhancing credential in the process. Unfortunately, those plans often don't work. There is a glut, an ever growing glut, of graduate degree holders. According to a study by the Rand Corporation, there is a 30% oversupply of Ph.D.s in the hot field of molecular biology. The situation is far worse in less in-demand fields, even the seemingly practical MBA. According to the Rand study, 16% of STANFORD MBA's were unable to find professional-level work within a year of graduation. The situation is far worse for graduates of the many less prestigious business schools. Yet universities offer more and more "executive" and distance MBA programs because they are cash cows. It appears of little concern to colleges that students are giving up years of their lives and up to $100,000 for a degree that may do little for their careers.

Perhaps even more outrageous is how ill-prepared graduates are. MBAs learn theory that rarely applies in the real world. It's axiomatic that law school graduates, ESPECIALLY those from prestigious law schools--have no idea how to practice law. They must be trained from Point Zero when hired by a law firm. This chapter will present many other examples of graduate schools' unconscionable behavior.

CHAPTER 12: REINVENTING GRADUATE SCHOOL.

CHAPTER 13: MAKING THE MOST OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM

CHAPTER 14: SPECIAL ADVICE FOR STUDENTS OVER 30.


http://www.martynemko.com/articles/truth-about-college-book-proposal_id1496

Utopia College

Here is why Utopia is a distinctive alternative:

§ We provide information that will help prospective students assess the quality of education offered at Utopia:

1. Results of the latest freshman-to-senior value-added assessment

2. Results of the annual student satisfaction survey

3. The four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates, disaggregated by high school grades and test score.

4. The average financial aid package for families with various incomes and assets. The amount of grant versus loan is reported.

You’ll see that Utopia’s does well on all four. Why?

§ Utopia is ideally sized: 4,500 undergraduates. The size of Princeton, Utopia is large enough to have critical mass, small enough to feel personal. Very few low-cost colleges are this size, but we can do it because of the many ways, described below, that we control cost without reducing quality.

§ Few of our faculty have PhDs—and we’re proud of it. A PhD prepares one primarily to do research, not teach undergraduates. And most PhDs are more interested in discovering new knowledge than in figuring out the optimal way to teach the basics—the opposite of what most undergraduates need.

So our faculty is drawn primarily from outstanding master’s and bachelor’s degree holders who, in addition to having mastered undergraduate-level content, have demonstrated they can consistently fascinate students. For practical courses such as journalism, nursing, and art, we use working professionals who also are superlative instructors. Not only are non-PhD faculty generally better, they are less expensive to hire and retain.

Before hiring, all faculty must complete a teaching boot camp. Most professions require specific training: doctors must take courses in how to diagnose and treat, lawyers in how to practice law. Only the professoriate is allowed to practice a core activity--teaching students--without being trained in how to teach.

Not at Utopia. Our teaching boot camp, which is required of all new faculty, includes master instructors modeling different types of excellent teaching plus extensive in-class evaluations of the prospective instructors’ teaching efforts.
After passing boot camp, some instructors, over time, may slip. So, any faculty member who, in a year, receives less than a 4.25 average student evaluation on the 5-point scale, must return to a refresher camp designed to enlighten and reenergize. If the following year, the instructor’s evaluations do not rise to at least 4.25, his or her employment is terminated.

§ There is no tenure at Utopia College. This ensures that you are not subjected to burned-out instructors. We, however, take great pains to ensure academic freedom, and make a point of ensuring that each department has instructors holding truly diverse views, spanning the full range of thought. America has, unfortunately become a nation of True Believers in-non-God-based religions: for example, environmentalism, socialism, or non-Eurocentric diversity. Such uncritical zealotry—whether from the Left or the Right—is inimical to rich discourse. Many colleges truncate discourse as it veers right of center. We do not—we believe that a college should offer a truly diverse and feisty marketplace of ideas.

§ As one of many ways we make Utopia affordable, faculty salaries are only moderate. We will not raise your tuition to pay a faculty “star” $150,000. Ironically, faculty usually become “stars” by shortchanging students in favor of their research and/or to marketing themselves. Despite the moderate salaries, few of our faculty leave Utopia, because we provide extraordinary opportunities to build camaraderie and for professional development. And our students love Utopia, so teaching here is a rewarding experience indeed.

§ For courses that are especially difficult to teach well, we create StarProf classes. For example, to create a calculus course, we identify a nation’s-best instructor, in part, by posting a job announcement in the magazine of the Mathematical Association of America (the professional association devoted to undergraduate math instruction). That job announcement invites math instructors around the nation to send Utopia a video of their teaching. When we find a truly extraordinary instructor, we pair that person with our online education development team and together, they craft a highly interactive, exciting course available to students online. Discussion sections exist both in online (with webcams) and in-person versions, recognizing that some students strongly prefer one over the other.

§ Students can test out of any course by passing a proctored final examination. We want to certify that our graduates have true bachelor’s level competency, not that they have logged X hours of seat time.

§ A Utopia degree actually certifies competence. Before graduation, students must pass an examination that assesses reading, writing, oral communication, information literacy, and critical thinking. This test certifies to future employers and graduate schools (and to the student) that the graduate has bachelor’s level competence in those crucial areas. Because all Utopia students take a parallel test at the beginning of their freshman year, this exam also helps Utopia measure its value-added.

§ The Utopia curriculum has only a few required courses (outside the major): practical writing, public speaking, information literacy, dating/marriage/parenting, career planning, and Essentials of Western Civilization. We are proud to have resisted the pressure to include other requirements for example, college-level mathematics. We are well aware of the argument that math is a building block of many careers. However, we also know that so many students who do not plan such careers, struggle mightily with higher math (often unsuccessfully) and will never need any of it. Ask most professionals the last time they used calculus derivatives or analysis of variance. And with regard to the argument that “math trains the mind,” so does Latin. That doesn’t mean we should require all students to take Latin. There are many routes to training the mind that do not require math. We offer an excellent math program for those who want it, but do not require it for graduation, except in majors such as physics and engineering.

§ We know that forcing students to take a course too often results in minimal learning—often just enough to get a decent grade, with little important learning retained even a week after the final. We believe in the concept of just-in-time learning: teach students what, at that time, they are motivated to learn. To that end, we have extensively surveyed our students to learn what they are most eager to study. As a result, we offer outstanding courses in social activism, health, photography, career exploration, job searching, practical writing, public speaking, dating, marriage, parenting, and financial planning. These courses are as rigorous as an undergraduate course should be. Readings and assignments are substantive but are relevant to students’ current lives. We know--from our freshman-to-senior value-added assessment--that students grow more in the unquestionably crucial abilities of oral and written communication, reading, leadership, information literacy, and connoisseurship because our students acquire them in the context of subjects they are highly motivated to learn.

§ We encourage instructors to center their courses around real-life situations or simulations. So, for example, a course might focus on how to reduce AIDS in the local community.

§ We encourage instructors to avoid the tyranny of content. Professors at other colleges frequently require students to read 1,000 or more pages for a three-unit course. Too often students read just enough to be able to pass a test. Such reading is unlikely to result in enduring learning. In contrast, a Utopia course in literature, might, for example, only require students to read the 100 pages of Hamlet plus a few essays of analysis. A government course might only require students to read the U.S. Constitution and a few diverse articles of commentary. Class meetings and assignments explore that limited content in depth, so students come away with richer and more enduring learning than from the typical college course.

§ Our campus is small and spartan, and we’re proud of that because it allows us to dramatically reduce the cost of your education while minimally affecting its quality:

1. Most colleges spend a fortune on fancy buildings, swimming pools, expensive landscaping, etc. Those entice prospective students but the cost must be added to tuition—and we do not believe that is a wise investment of your money. Instead of building our own veritable country club, we have a basic gym and a cooperative arrangement with a nearby YMCA, which enables students to have access to a swimming pool for a modest fee.

2. The classrooms are surprisingly few for a college of 4,500 undergraduates, and you’ll wonder why there usually are so few students on campus. We’re proud of both. Here’s why. Faculty has the option to teach classes in their own homes. With most Utopia classes having 15 or fewer students (That’s what we invest our money in), this is feasible. Instructors enjoy teaching at home because they have a zero-minute commute and receive a small classroom rental fee. Students enjoy it because it feels homier than a typical classroom. Plus, the college saves money in not having to build many classroom buildings. That means lower tuition and smaller classes for you.

3. Utopia’s residence halls are clean and designed by a top architect, but are not plush. We do, however, invest heavily in our co-curricular program so that the out-of-classroom experience delights our students. With an innovative array of activities and programs, we do everything possible to facilitate students developing enriching relationships with other students and with faculty.

Our cost-effective campus is key to our being able to make Utopia one of the most affordable selective four-year colleges in the nation.

§ Our competitive sports program maximizes benefits to the entire student body. Even schools with Division III (minimally competitive) intercollegiate athletics such as Williams and Amherst, admit large percentages of their class, in part, based on whether they can play an intercollegiate sport. This doesn’t create an optimal student body. Instead, at Utopia, athletic ability is not considered in admissions.

In addition, Utopia’s sports teams, like those at some Australian colleges, compete in the local city leagues. All of our students, of course, are encouraged to attend games. This saves Utopia the enormous sums colleges spend on intercollegiate athletics while allowing our student athletes to play competitively for their college team and for other students to cheer them on.

§ Financial aid packages at Utopia are strictly non-negotiable unless there is important new information not reflected in the financial aid application, for example, that the student’s parent has just lost his or her job. This ensures that the student-aid pie is distributed based on need and merit, without regard to how well a parent negotiates.

§ Another way we keep costs down while keeping quality up is that Utopia has among the nation’s leanest administrations. We don’t believe that faculty need chairpersons, deans, assistant deans, and other administrators. Utopia has a president, an academic vice president, and a vice president for non-academic affairs. That’s it. By taking extraordinary care in hiring our faculty and staff, we know they can do a great job without much supervision.

§ Utopia spends a tiny fraction of what most colleges spend on marketing. We’ve found that by making Utopia the best undergraduate program possible at a truly affordable price, and clearly documenting our student outcomes (beauty marks and warts) on our website, students and parents will find us. And because of the college’s quality and refusal to spend much on marketing, Utopia gets significant free publicity in all the college guides, and Utopia is the darling of the media, which provides marketing benefits no money could buy. We pour the mammoth sums most colleges spend in recruitment directly into student programs.
And now dear reader of this article, as you contemplate how to improve your campus, is there anything about Utopia College you’d like to incorporate? Anyone want to actually create Utopia College?


http://www.martynemko.com/articles/utopia-college_id1240

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/education-reinvented_id1236

Think back to the last class or workshop you attended. How much do you remember? If you’re like most people, not much. And that was when you were an adult, chose the class, and perhaps paid for it.

Now imagine school kids. They must endure class after class on topics they never would have chosen: American history in the 4^th grade, pre-algebra in the 8^th, or chemistry in the 11^th. And each class is no mere one-hour seminars; it’s a 180-hour marathon. And kids have shorter attention span than adults. It’s little wonder they forget, let alone incorporate into their lives most of what they were taught.

Children have so much curiosity, so much energy. Yet most schools, even most well-funded suburban schools, have long managed to leach the life out of so many kids. One parent wrote, “I waved good-bye to my bright-eyed kindergartner. Now I say hello to a dulled fourth grader.”

And by high school, the dulling usually accelerates: geometric theorems, the causes of the War of 1812, the periodic table, the subjunctive tense, fat textbook after fat textbook—material that could deaden the most vibrant teen. If you ask teenagers—suburban, urban, or rural--what they think of school, their most frequent responses: “boring” or “Why I need to know that stuff?”.

Think of how you feel when you go to a two-hour movie that you find boring. That’s just two hours. Imagine the collective frustration of the millions of suburban kids who are bored in school, day after day, year after year. The impacts are horrible for them—such wasted time and lost potential, such alienation.

The impacts may be even worse for low-income children. Most suburban kids have family backgrounds and peer influences that usually enable them to have a bad school experience and still do okay in life. That’s often not the case for poor kids.

That’s the major reason why, over the last 35 years, we have bet $3 trillion in tax dollars that we can improve the schools. Unfortunately, we’ve lost the bet. According to educational assessment’s gold standard—the National Assessment of Educational Progress—student achievement has barely budged since NAEP began measuring the impacts of school reform in 1969. In international comparisons, American students score near the bottom among industrialized nations. Even our top students are now sinking compared with other countries’ best students.

Perhaps most disheartening, the definitive study of the effectiveness of Title I, the expensive linchpin of the federal government’s efforts to help low-performing schools, finds that Title I hasn’t even made a dent into the differences between society’s have and have-nots—and since 1989, the achievement gap has actually increased.

A recent Arianna Huffington column cites newly-released federal statistics: “What we are facing is nothing less than an educational catastrophe, with 37 percent of fourth graders unable to read. The statistics get even grimmer when broken down by economic and racial groups. Sixty-three percent of African American children are functionally illiterate, as are 60 percent of poor children.”

Why do we continue to teach the things that even good students usually forget the day after the test? Mainly it’s tradition—schools change at glacial speed. But it’s also because curriculum is developed by scholarly Ph.D.s who value their discipline so much that they insist that every bit of arcana is indispensable. And because we would hate to appear as though we were defending low standards, we accept the scholars’ recommendations.

This is especially devastating to the millions of slow learners. By definition, they’re going to leave high school knowing relatively little. That makes it crucial that what they do learn be as important as possible. Until every student has acquired the basic life skills, it is elitist of us to insist that they understand non-linear functions, the electron structure of the elements in the Periodic Table, the pre- and post-Columbian explorers’ voyages, etc., etc., etc.

Lest you think I exaggerate, here’s an example of the state of New York’s objectives for all its students: “Students relate processes at the system level to the cellular level in order to explain dynamic equilibrium in multi-celled organisms.” Let’s cross the country. Here’s a sample item from the exam that every high school student in California will be required to pass: “What is the prime factored form for the lowest common denominator of 2/9 + 7/12.” That was an item rated as of average difficulty! Could you answer it? In your entire life have you ever needed to know this? Even if you’re a scientist, you probably will never need to know that.

Forcing all kids, even slow learners, to know such things—even if they graduate without decent reading, writing, and arithmetic skills--is what we’re endorsing whenever we nod in agreement when some educrat or politician calls for “high standards for all students.”

What to Do?

We must ask ourselves: What are the most important things kids need to learn? We must teach those first. Reading, sure. Number sense, yes. Writing, of course. How to use a computer. Sure. Appreciating the complexity of major life dilemmas, yes. Interpersonal communication skills, absolutely.

What might a reinvented high school curriculum look like?

Roughly ¼ of traditionally-required high school courses would become elective, replaced by required life skills courses as follows:

English/Language Arts

Of the four-years of high school English, roughly three are currently devoted to the study of literature. One year of that literature work would be replaced by this course:

Language for Life. Using common real-life situations, this course would develop students’ ability to make logical and well-presented arguments orally and in writing. The course would also focus on enhancing reading of crucial material such as newspapers and magazines, voter handbooks, consumer contracts, employee and product assembly manuals, and how-to books.

NOTE: Students entering 9^th grade would be able to test out of this course and in its stead take a more advanced course in research, rhetoric, and in written and oral persuasive communication. Debating, mediation, and brainstorming sessions would be often used as vehicles for teaching these skills.

History/Government

One year of the typically-taken four years of history/government would be replaced by:

Psychology for Life. Using common real-life situations and extensive use of role-playing, this course would help students develop new understanding and skills in such areas as conflict resolution, coping with anxieties, teasing/cliquishness, self-esteem, drug abuse, and sexuality.

Math

One year of the typically-taken four years of college-preparatory math (algebra, geometry, algebra 2/trigonometry and precalculus) would be replaced by:

Math for Life. Many students graduate from high school able to solve the problems in the Algebra 2 textbook yet unable to deal with more common real-world math problems, for example, to address the question, “Can I afford to buy a home?” This requires an understanding of how to set up this problem, calculate likely mortgage payments, estimate likely income (after taxes) over at least the first few years of home ownership, etc. The Math for Life course would use common real-life scenarios to teach crucial math understandings that are lacking in a surprising number of high school and even college graduates.

NOTE: Students entering 9^th grade would be able to test out of this course and in its stead, take a more advanced math course.

Science

One year of the typically-taken four years of science would be replaced by this course:

Information Literacy. The information explosion provides tremendous power to those who can harness it. This course would show students how to optimally use the Internet, libraries, and interviewing to obtain desired information.

Foreign Language

One year of the typically-taken three years of foreign language would be replaced by:

Career Exploration. Even after college, many people graduate unsure of what they want to be when they grow up. Part of the reason is that they are aware of only a small fraction of the thousands of career options available. Even fewer people have a good sense of what career would best suit them. It normally takes years to identify a well-suited career. High school is the time to begin the career exploration process. This course would not attempt to pigeonhole students into a career. It would expose them to a wide range of options, use various methods to identify each student’s strengths, weaknesses, values, and interests, and show them how to discover what careers might fit them. Non-college-bound students would be exposed to quality non-dead-end careers not requiring a college education.

Before recommending wide implementation of such a reinvented curriculum, a pilot test must be conducted with a random sample of students receiving a traditional curriculum and half receiving the high-relevance curriculum. The two groups should be followed to identify differences in 3R skills, attendance, crime, satisfaction with high school experience, college attendance, college completion, career attainment, and self-reported satisfaction with life.

CONCLUSION

School reform is going in the precise wrong direction. I believe we must reinvent the curriculum so it emphasizes the true basic skills—the 3Rs of course, plus life survival skills such as conflict resolution. Not only would students learn more and become more productive citizens, they’d be less likely to say, “Why do I need to know that?”


http://www.martynemko.com/articles/reinventing-high-school-curriculum_id1246

Education Reinvented

We’re all taught to think outside the box. I’m hoping that the idea presented in this column will help trigger your out-of-the-box thinking related to your worklife. And if you’re in the field of education, one of the Bay Area’s largest employment fields, it may be additionally relevant to you.

We give high school diplomas to people with frighteningly poor ability to read, write, use computers, and most important, reason. Not only is the result of education bad, so is the process. Most students dislike school, at least the academic part. Teachers don’t like it either. 46 percent of high school teachers leave within five years.

So-called school reform has gone on for decades, but it’s mainly a pendulum that swings from Method A to Method B and back--for example, ability-grouped to mixed-ability classes and back, back-to-basics to holistic education and back. But education’s core structure—a teacher with a class of 30 students in a school—remains essentially as it was centuries ago.

It’s time for education to be not reformed, but reinvented. Of course, students need academics, extracurriculars, socialization, and more, but using the school building as the primary vehicle seems, to me, obsolete.

Here is what I believe is a smarter approach to both high school and college education. It also is relevant to corporate training. I call it Ed².

The Ed² “school” day would be divided into three parts: online, mentorship/fieldwork, and extracurricular.

8 AM – 12 Noon The student, at home, would go to a website, his or her online school and sign in with a fingerprint ID. At random intervals, the student would re-sign-in to ensure the student was doing his own work.

Each morning, the studentwould participate in five individually-paced courses, some semester-long, some shorter. Because the courses would be delivered online, each one could be taught by a world-class instructor. Thus, if Ed² were replicated nationally, every student, rich or poor, in the US (and beyond?) would receive a superb teacher instead of a random one. And instead of we, the taxpayers, paying for 30,000 teachers and 30,000 classrooms, we would be paying for one.

Most class sessions wouldinclude mini-lectures, demonstrations, and importantly, simulations—opportunities for students to try thingsinfeasible in the real world—for example, trying to restore an ecosystem or solve the Palestinian/Israeli crisis.

Content that’s irrelevant to most students’ lives such as quadratic equations, the Peloponnesian Wars, and the halide series of chemical elements would be replaced by crucial learning usually omitted from the curriculum, for example, conflict resolution, entrepreneurship, ethical citizenship, financial literacy, and advanced Internet searching.

Students needing assistance could email or phone the live instructors available for that purpose.

For each course, each student would choose to participate in one of three types of discussion groups:

--real time online, for think-on-their feet students,

-- asynchronous online, often preferred byreflective students, or

-- in-person at school, for students whovalue face-to-face contact more than the convenience of online discussions.

Tests would be graded instantly by computer, with open-ended questions graded by live teachers. Those live teachers would also provide low- and high-scores with extra help or revised curriculum.

A student could test out of any course—we want to credit accomplishment, not seat time.

1 PM to 3 PM Students would report(in person, by phone, or online depending on the situation) to their mentor—a seven-week-long renewable pairing with an adult.

The pairing would be based on questionnaires completed both by mentor and student, akin to match.com. For example, a student who aspires to be a physician might be mentored by a coroner and get to observe and participate in autopsies. An aspiring businessperson might be mentored by a retired executive and together, create and perhaps even implement a business plan.

Each student would spend at least one semester in a service learning setting, for example, Habitat for Humanity or in a city council member’s office.

Mentors and students would receive training on how to make the most of the mentoring relationship.

3 PM to 5 PM Students would meet in a school for sports, art, theater activities, and other non-academic and socialization activities.

No new schools will be built. Any need for additional space would be filled by leasing space from churches and at-work people’s living rooms or family rooms that sit empty all day. So many group activities—from rehearsing scenes from a play to club meetings-- could be conducted in homes. The cost of leasing and insurance is tiny compared to that of constructing and maintaining new buildings.

How could such a radical change be implemented when even modest school reform proceeds at glacial speed? The schools are too beholding to the status quo’s beneficiaries to support this idea. A foundation should fund a rigorous pilot test of the program. If successful, it should be promoted to the general public via the media.

Now, I turn to you, my reader. In your work, if you tossed aside all elements of the status quo and tried to build a better mousetrap from ground zero, what would you do?

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/education-reinvented_id1236