To follow is an excerpt from the CQ Researcher issue "Crime on Campus" by Peter Katel on February 4, 2011
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In 2002 — 12 years after the Clery Act was enacted and eight years after regulations for carrying it out were issued — the most comprehensive survey to date of colleges' responses to sexual assault found that only 36.5 percent of institutions were reporting statistics in a manner fully consistent with the law's requirements. [Footnote 17]
Of all the issues involved in compiling data 
from a variety of campus sources — from college police departments to dormitory advisers and rape-crisis centers — one of the most complex is confidentiality. Under 1998 amendments to the Clery Act, professional mental health counselors and religious counselors are encouraged but not required to disclose the number of reports of alleged sexual offenses they've received. [Footnote 18]
Yet, by all accounts, counselors receive far more reports from victims than do police or college officials. And many college counselors work at women's centers, whose services typically include counseling and support for victims of sexual violence.
The Clery Act counseling exemption reflected the position of the American Psychological Association (APA). “Students should feel confident that what they say to a counselor is in confidence,” an association spokeswoman, Nina Levitt, said in 1999. Even reporting raw data could jeopardize that confidentiality, she said. [Footnote 19] Psychologists have been concerned that campus authorities could demand that victims disclose specific information on a potential offender, for instance, in order to protect other students' safety.
The University of Colorado's Friedrichs says the confidentiality provision serves a valuable purpose. “We are a confidential office; we are not required to tell anybody anything unless we have a written release of information,” she says. A change in that policy would “impact on the student and our ability to communicate.”
A further complication, says S. Daniel Carter, public policy director of Security on Campus, is that some states extend a confidentiality exemption not only to professional counselors but also to victims' advocates who may not have professional credentials. Even so, he says, the number of schools that exclude crime data because of the exemption isn't known. “No one has done large-scale research” on that issue, he says.
The exemption has led to some confusion at one of the country's biggest university systems. In 2003, the U.S. Department of Education ruled that the University of California (UC) had misinterpreted the counselor exemption to exclude crime data that came from all campus officials who may have done some counseling — as opposed to full-time counselors. “Institutions are expected to determine which officials … do not have significant counseling responsibilities,” the department ruled. UC had changed its policies by the time the department ruled, and the school wasn't penalized. [Footnote 20]
Moreover, even supporters of the counseling exemption say that statistics on sexual assaults can be misleading because the events that students recount may have occurred in hometowns or in childhood. It's a point Friedrichs makes. Her victim-assistance center's database, for instance, doesn't contain a separate classification for alleged sexual assaults that took place on campus, she says. If the center decided to report statistics, “we would have to start counting our numbers differently,” she adds. There has been no discussion of doing so, however, she says.
Even if a center did decide to report sexual-assault figures, how a counselor asks about a student's experience can make a big difference in how an event is classified. Fisher, the University of Cincinnati political scientist, and her colleagues found that when college women were asked detailed questions about uninvited sexual encounters without use of the word “rape,” responses made clear that more sexual attacks occurred than women were reporting. The researchers found a victimization rate of 27.7 assaults per 1,000 female students. And because some women were victimized more than once, the rate of incidents was 35.3 per 1,000 students. [Footnote 21]
“In a given academic year … for a campus with 10,000 women, this would mean the number of rapes could exceed 350,” they wrote. [Footnote 22]
Ada Meloy, general counsel of the American Council on Education (ACE), which advocates on policy issues for colleges and universities, argues, however, that while “there are said to be many instances” of unreported sexual assaults, “if they're not reported, you do have to wonder how serious they were or whether they occurred, frankly.”
Meloy also says that “most institutions have disciplinary procedures that are adequate to handle sexual-assault allegations,” though she adds that “sexual assault is also a criminal matter and college procedures are not a substitute for that avenue of addressing situations that may occur.”
Kassa of Security on Campus suggests one mechanism to get around the confidentiality problem: Have counselors voluntarily report aggregate numbers of alleged crimes to a third party, who then would transmit them to the people who do the statistical crime compilations required by the Clery Act. That would separate the counseling function from the data-gathering function altogether, he maintains. “You don't have to have your counselors make the statistical report.”
The key point of the Clery Act's counselor confidentiality privilege is that it's not mandatory, Kassa says. “This is the beauty of the Clery Act — it gives [colleges] all the discretion in the world.”
Georgetown's Cantalupo says she has no problem with reporting aggregate data on reported sexual assaults. She acknowledges that some counselors fear that women would refrain from speaking of their experiences if they thought that what they said would automatically be disclosed to campus authorities. But, she says, that reaction could be dissipated if counselors made clear that they would report nothing but numbers.
A problem could arise if college administrators treated a statistical disclosure as an overall waiver of the counselor exemption, Cantalupo says. But “any institution that is really interested in solving this problem will not do something like that,” she says, “because they would realize that their victim-advocate office is their best possibility for fixing the problem” of sexual violence on campus.
Sokolow, the campus-safety consultant, argues that changing the Clery Act to require statistical disclosure from counseling centers would be a bad idea. But he says institutions should urge counseling centers to report numbers of alleged assaults voluntarily. “Schools ought to be saying, ‘Share your statistics,’” he says.
The Issues
* Has the Clery Act increased campus safety?
* Should campus women's centers be required to report statistics on sexual violence?
* Are laws and lawsuits forcing schools to become more protective of students?
For more information on the CQ Researcher report on "Crime on Campus" [subscription required] or purchase the PDF.
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Footnotes
[17] Heather M. Karjane, et al., “Campus Sexual Assault: How America's Institutions of Higher Education Respond,” Education Development Center, 2002, p. vii, www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/196676.pdf.
[18] “Code of Federal Regulations, Title 34 — Education, Part 668, Subpart D, Sec. 668.46,” www.securityoncampus.org/pages/34cfr668.46.html.
[19] Quoted in Christina DeNardo, “Law closes loopholes in campus crime reporting,” Daily Orange (Syracuse University), April 30, 1999.
[20] “Final Program Review Determination Letter,” U.S. Education Department, March 31, 2003, pp. 10–12, http://federalstudentaid.ed.gov/datacenter/cleryact/ucla/UCLAFPRDL0332003.pdf; Rebecca Trounson, “Study Faults Crime Reports at UC,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2003, p. B7.
[21] Fisher, et al., op cit.
[22] Ibid., p. 11.
Should campus women's centers be required to report statistics on sexual violence?
Should the government restrict student aid to career and trade schools?
To follow is an excerpt from the CQ Researcher issue "Career Colleges" by Barbara Mantel on January 7, 2011
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Any day now the Department of Education could release the much-anticipated final version of a regulation that would restrict federal student aid at career colleges and trade schools. “While career colleges play a vital role in training our work force to be globally competitive, some of them are saddling students with debt they cannot afford in exchange for degrees and certificates they cannot use,” Education Secretary Duncan said when the department first proposed the gainful-employment rule last July. [Footnote 27]
The department was scheduled to publish the final rule last Octob
er, but furious lobbying by the for-profit sector caused it to reconsider. “Through this proposed regulation, the department will be making law that shuts out the very students who have the most to gain through their access to the programs offered by career colleges,” said Washington lawyer Lanny Davis, spokesman for the Coalition for Educational Success, a group representing career colleges. [Footnote 28]
To qualify for federal student aid, the Higher Education Act for decades has required that career colleges and vocational-training programs prepare students for gainful employment in recognized occupations. But gainful employment has never been defined. Now the department is attempting to do just that and has ignited a contentious debate.
The proposed rule is complicated. A program would be fully eligible for federal student aid if at least 45 percent of its former students — whether graduates or dropouts — are repaying the principal on their federal student loans. Even if a program's repayment rate is lower than that, it could still be eligible if its graduates have a debt-to-earnings ratio of less than 20 percent of discretionary income or 8 percent of total income. (Discretionary income is defined as income above 150 percent of the poverty level.)
A program would be ineligible for student financial aid if its repayment rate is less than 35 percent and its graduates have a debt-to-earnings ratio above 30 percent of discretionary income and 12 percent of total income.
Programs between these two poles would be on a restricted list. They could still enroll students with federal financial aid but would not be able to expand, and they would have to warn students about the high debt burdens they are likely to carry in relation to the salaries they are likely to earn. [Footnote 29]
The industry says the consequences for the students it serves would be enormous. An industry-commissioned analysis estimates that between 1 and 2 million fewer students would enter postsecondary schooling over the next 10 years as a result of the rule.Footnote 30
The Department of Education disagrees. It estimates that the vast majority of students at for-profit schools that could be deemed ineligible would be able to transfer to another program or school. Future students would attend the remaining eligible schools. [Footnote 31]
Federal Loan Default Rates by Type of School
Jonathan Guryan, a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University in Chicago, says the department is much too optimistic. Guryan researched and wrote the industry study and says only a quarter of affected students have reasonable alternatives. “That's partially because many community colleges are at capacity and partially because there are not other for-profits nearby with similar programs,” he says.
But Pauline Abernathy, vice president of the nonprofit Institute for College Access and Success in Oakland, Calif., says the remaining for-profit schools will fill the void. “The industry has demonstrated it can and will rapidly expand capacity,” says Abernathy. “Keep in mind also that at least seven of the 14 publicly traded colleges have more than 50 percent of their students in exclusively online curriculums, so proximity and physical space are not necessarily even issues.”
Guryan, however, says such expansion may not make sense. “It's hard to imagine that for-profit schools would create new programs to serve those students,” he says. “Presumably they would be worried that their programs would fail, too.” After all, a closed program would be ineligible “at least in part because of the characteristics and choices of the students it served,” according to Guryan. [Footnote 32]
But critics of the industry say poor results for schools that serve at-risk students are not inevitable and that schools could raise repayment rates and lower debt levels for their students more than the industry assumes is possible.
For instance, a recent study analyzed the experience of a small group of historically black colleges and universities in Texas, which 11 years ago faced critically high student-loan default rates. Over three years, the schools managed to more than halve default rates by improving student retention and graduation, offering better loan counseling, partnering with outside financial-aid experts and improving financial-aid packaging. [Footnote 33]
The for-profit higher education sector's objections to the proposed gainful employment rule go beyond the rule's projected unintended consequences. The industry also says the caps on debt-to-earnings ratios are arbitrary; the process for devising the rule was biased; and the statutory authority of the Department of Education to make such a sweeping change is nonexistent.
“They simply were unwilling to let this proposal go through the sunshine of a legislative debate,” says Miller of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities. When asked if a lawsuit is possible, Miller says, “All options are on the table.”
While the industry is hoping the department withdraws the gainful employment rule or makes significant changes, groups like Abernathy's are hoping the department makes it stronger. For example, programs that are restricted can remain so indefinitely, and simply not allowing them to grow is not much punishment, says Abernathy.
“Some of these schools went through such rapid growth earlier that limiting the number of students to the level of the year before would still be an enormous number of students.”
A few for-profit companies have already taken action to improve student outcomes. Kaplan is allowing students to enroll in classes for several weeks to test out a program and withdraw during that time without any tuition obligation. And the University of Phoenix is requiring students who enter with fewer than 24 credits to take a free, three-week, non-credit orientation.
The Issues:
* Is deception pervasive at career colleges?
* Do career colleges provide a quality education?
* Should the government restrict student aid to career and trade schools?
For more information on the CQ Researcher report on "Career Colleges" [subscription required] or purchase the PDF.
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Footnotes
[27] “Department of Education Established New Student Aid Rules to Protect Borrowers and Taxpayers,” Department of Education, Oct. 28, 2010, www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/department-education-establishes-new-student-aid-rules-protect-borrowers-and-tax.
[28] Lanny Davis, “Time for a Re-Do on ‘Gainful Employment,’” The Huffington Post, Nov. 18, 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com/lanny-davis/time-for-a-redo-on-gainfu_b_785121.html.
[29] “Frequently Asked Questions, Program Integrity: Gainful Employment Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,” Department of Education, www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2009/ge-faq.pdf.
[30] Charles River Associates, letter to Tony Miller, Deputy Education Secretary, Nov. 22, 2010, p. 1.
[31] “Frequently Asked Questions,” op. cit.
[32] Jonathan Guryan and Mathew Thompson, “The Availability of Alternative Programs for Students Displaced by Gainful Employment: Testing Assumptions Crucial to Estimates of the Impact of Gainful Employment on Students,” Charles River Associates, Nov. 22, 2010, p. 3.
[33] Erin Dillion and Robin V. Smiles, “Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black institutions Did to Succeed,” Feb. 2010, Education Sector, p. 5, www.educationsector.org/sites/default/files/publications/Default_Rates_HBCU.pdf.
Does the Internet make us smarter?
To follow is an excerpt from the September 24, 2010 CQ Researcher report on "Impact of the Internet on Thinking" by Alan Greenblatt.
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The Pew Internet & American Life Project put a variation of Nicholas Carr's question 
— “Does Google make us stupid?” — to hundreds of technology experts. [Footnote 14] A majority disagreed with Carr's premise, but their ideas about how intelligence had been reshaped by the Internet ranged widely.
Some felt that people were freed up from rote tasks such as memorization of facts. That could end up meaning that we have to redefine what we mean by intelligence, as machines take up a greater share of the tasks once left to the human mind. Some stated their belief that the Internet had helped create a “hive brain” that allows people to share thoughts and come to collective solutions to complex problems together.
“There's a pretty broad feeling among lots of technology users that these tools can serve their needs in new ways,” says Lee Rainie, who directs the Pew project.
“You can gather up information quickly and easily, which might have taken you enormous amounts of time in an earlier age,” he says. “At the same time, people will moan and groan about the distractions that these devices bring into their lives.”
No one disputes that the Internet has made much more information readily available to just about anyone. “It's been a boon in that it gives access to all kinds of stuff that a crummy high-school library wouldn't have even come close to having,” says Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University.
But Thompson worries that the way Google filters information makes it potentially less useful, in certain respects. He jokes that good students will cite material from the third page of links that a Google search calls up, while bad students will not look past the first page.
“The problem is that so much of the stuff that would really be a boon is not used, because it's not on the first page of a Google search,” he says.
The narrowing of information — necessary given the glut that's now available — can cause problems even among serious researchers. Lehrer, the author of How We Decide, cites a study indicating that since scientific papers have been widely available online, fewer of them are being cited.
“Even though we have access to all sorts of information, we seem to be citing the same texts,” Lehrer says. “The Internet allows us to filter our world, to cherry-pick our facts. It's just human nature writ large.”
David Levy, a professor at the University of Washington's Information School, says that the rapid transmission and accumulation of knowledge made possible by technology is helpful, but he worries that information overload can have some ill effects.
Namely, he's concerned that the flood of information leaves people with no time to think. “There's another piece of the process of learning and growing and getting information further assimilated, and that's the time for contemplation,” he says. “We're just not allowing ourselves sufficiently the time to do deeper reflection.”
Paul Saffo, managing director for Discern Analytics, a Silicon Valley forecasting firm, says there's a case to be made that the Internet is helping to make individuals smarter. There have been studies showing that not just Web searches but also video games are good at stimulating and strengthening parts of the brain.
“Video games turn out to be amazing for the brain,” Lehrer says. “They're like doing pushups for the brain.”
But Saffo worries, too, that the Internet ethos of instant and ever-changing information can have its deleterious effects on society as a whole. “The collective impact of this technology causes more people to look at and concentrate on the immediate at the expense of the long-term,” he says.
This effect of everyone concentrating solely on the moment can lead to catastrophic mistakes and have an ill effect on democracy, Saffo suggests. “This is the dark side of the eternal present,” he says. “There's no capacity to step back and frame things in different ways. Anyone who dares think long-term will be taken down.”
In his Atlantic article and follow-up book The Shallows, Carr is careful to state that the Internet has been enormously beneficial in a number of ways. Critics of his book nevertheless contend that he has overstated the extent of the problems of concentration and deep thought created or exacerbated by technology.
Proportion of Recreational Computer Time Spent on Various Activities
To the extent that people skim, get distracted or fail to think deeply about the words and images flitting across their screens — well, people have always found ways to avoid thinking too deeply. Long before Twitter, there were television sitcoms, Lehrer points out. And long before people could waste time playing Minesweeper and Scrabble online, there were plenty of games made out of cardboard and plastic.
But Carr argues that the Internet is not simply a tool for distraction and time wasting. He says it affects how the brain processes information.
In his book, Carr cites studies showing that people reading short stories with hyperlinks embedded in them retain a good deal less of the content than people who read them on the printed page, because the need to make decisions about whether to click on the links keeps them from concentrating on the text at hand. [Footnote 15]
“Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators and Web designers point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning,” Carr writes in The Shallows.
“It's possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it's possible to think shallowly while reading a book,” Carr continues, “but that's not the type of thinking that technology encourages and rewards.” [Footnote 16]
Getting used to technological distraction can cause problems in social settings, suggests Small, the UCLA psychiatrist.
“We have a generation of digital natives with very strong techno-skills and very strong neuro pathways for multitasking and experiencing partial continuous attention and other wonderful adaptive skills,” Small says. “But they're not developing the face-to-face human contact skills.”
There isn't strong data about this, Small says, but the idea that young people, especially, have more difficulty interacting with people in person when they are texting other people with near-constancy is evident all around us, he suggests.
“The Internet's not making us stupid or smarter — it's changing the way we're processing information,” Small says.
“You cannot stop the technology train,” he adds. “It's way out of the station, coming down the tracks. You have to adapt.”
The Issues:
*Is the Web changing the way we think?
*Does the Web shorten attention spans?
*Are people addicted to the Internet?
For more information see the CQ Researcher report on "Impact of the Internet on Thinking" [subscription required] or purchase the PDF
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Footnotes
[14] Janna Quitney Anderson and Lee Rainie, “Does Google Make Us Stupid?” Pew Internet & American Life Project, Feb. 19, 2010.
[15] Carr, op. cit., p. 127.
[16] Ibid., p. 115.
Should teachers be held more accountable for students' performance?
To follow is an excerpt from the CQ Researcher report on "Revising No Child Left Behind" by Kenneth Jost, April 16, 2010
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When teachers at chronically underperforming Central Falls High School in Rhode Island balked at agreeing to extend the school day by 25 minutes without any additional pay, 
the school board and school superintendent decided on Feb. 23 to fire the entire staff. Termination notices were read aloud at a contentious school board meeting for 93 people altogether, from the principal and assistant principal down through 74 classroom teachers and other educational or administrative aides.
The episode gained national attention when President Obama — echoing earlier favorable comments from Education Secretary Duncan — endorsed the board's action. “If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability,” Obama said on March 1. “And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week.” [Footnote 15]
The mass firings are now on hold, pending mediation between the school board and the local teachers' union. But the cooling-off came only after heated comment from NEA and AFT leaders and many individual teachers. Anthony J. Mullen, a Greenwich, Conn., teacher and the current teacher of the year, said the call for firing teachers to improve schools reflects an “off-with-their-heads mentality.” [Footnote 16]
The focus on tenure for individual teachers represents a significant policy change from No Child Left Behind in its present form. “Teachers were not really accountable under No Child Left Behind; schools were,” says McGuinn, the Drew University political scientist. “There were no consequences for teachers if students didn't perform.”
Conservative education experts are applauding the administration's approach. Increasing teacher accountability is “a good thing,” says the Fordham Institute's Finn. “While any given teacher may not have huge control over a kid, the cumulative effect of teachers is the single most important influence on what a kid learns — or maybe the second most important after home and neighborhood.”
Leaders of the two national teachers' unions sharply disagree with the administration's approach. They say firing teachers is a punitive approach with no sound basis that ignores other factors in student performance and in the end does little if anything to help students improve.
“The idea that you can measure a teacher's work or a student's work on the basis of a test on a single day is absurd,” says the NEA's Van Roekel. “There's no test that you can give that can evaluate what I've taught over the year.”
Obama's plan “seems to be holding teachers 100 percent responsible for students' success,” says the AFT's Weingarten, “without giving teachers any authority or leverage to get the tools they need to do their jobs and any countervailing responsibility on anyone else.”
School management groups also view the administration's approach as too severe. “I would like to see more latitude in terms of model intervention,” says Wilhoit of the state education chiefs' group, specifically referring to teacher dismissals. But, he adds, “we need to get serious as a country to turn around these chronically underperforming schools.”
“We don't think there are any data out there that show that those remedies will help,” says Felton of the school boards association. Some principals or teachers may need to be reassigned, Felton says, but the administration's blueprint “doesn't focus on the skill sets that you need to really turn around any program.”
Criticism also has come from Ravitch, the supporter-turned-critic of conservative versions of school choice and accountability. “Wouldn't it make more sense to send in help instead of an execution squad?” Ravitch writes on an Education Week blog. [Footnote 17]
The administration's blueprint ties the firing of teaching staffs with the implementation of “a research-based instructional program” along with a “new governance structure” and “extended learning time.” Interestingly, Obama strikes a more supportive tone in the two-page introduction to the blueprint. “We must do better to recruit, develop, support, retain, and reward outstanding teachers in America's classroom,” the president writes.
“Some of these schools have real numbers of teachers who either are ineffective or have become discouraged,” says American Enterprise Institute expert Hess. “Replacing teachers can bring in more effective teachers and create a necessary sense of urgency. What bothers me is that there's some stock playbook and that somehow this is going to take a consistently underperforming school and put it on a better trajectory.”
The Issues:
*Should states adopt the proposed “common core standards” for English and math?
*Should the Education Department focus remedial efforts on the worst-performing schools?
*Should teachers be held more accountable for students' performance?
For more information see the CQ Researcher report "Revising No Child Left Behind" [subscription required] or purchase the CQ Researcher PDF.
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Footnotes:
[15] See Steven Greenhouse and Sam Dillon, “A Wholesale School Shake-Up Is Embraced by the President, and Divisions Follow,” The New York Times, March 7, 2010, p. A20. For local coverage of the school board action, see Jennifer D. Jordan, “Teachers fired, labor outraged,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, Feb. 24, 2010, p. 1.
[16] Quoted in Greenhouse and Dillon, op. cit.
[17] Diane Ravitch, “Try Again, Secretary Duncan, It's Not Too Late,” Bridging Differences, March 23, 2010.
Bilingual Education vs. English Immersion
To follow is an excerpt from the "Overview" section of the report on "Bilingual Education vs. English Immersion" by Kenneth Jost, December 11, 2009
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Miriam Flores remembers that her daughter Miriam was doing well in her first two years in school in the border town of Nogales, Ariz.
“She knew how to read and write in Spanish,” Flores says of her daughter, now a college student. “She would even correct the teacher on accents and spelling.”
In the third grade, however, Miriam began having difficulties. Her grades went down, and she began having nightmares.
Miriam’s mother has a simple explanation for the change. In the early 1990s, Nogales provided bilingual education – teaching English learners in both their native language and English – but only through the first two grades. “It was the language,” Flores says.
Miriam’s new teacher did not speak Spanish, taught only in English and seemed uninterested in Miriam’s language difficulties, Flores says. “Miriam is a very quiet child, and I thought it was strange that the teacher would say that she talked a lot,” Flores recalls today. “Then Miriam told me, ‘I ask the other kids what the teacher is saying.’ She didn’t understand.”
Flores’ frustrations with her daughter’s schooling led her to join with other Spanish-speaking Nogales families in 1992 in filing a federal suit aimed at improving educational opportunities for non-English-speaking students in the overwhelmingly Hispanic town. The class action suit claimed the school district was failing to comply with a federal law – the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 – which requires each state to take “appropriate action” to ensure that English-language learners (ELLs) enjoy “equal participation in its instructional programs.”
Seventeen years later, the case is still in federal court. The plaintiffs won a pivotal decision in 2001 requiring Arizona to boost funding for English-language learning in Nogales and the rest of the state. In a narrowly divided decision in June, however, the Supreme Court gave state officials an opportunity to set aside the lower court ruling.
Writing for the 5-4 majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the federal district judge had failed to adequately consider changed circumstances since 2001. Among other changes, Alito cited the state’s decision to drop bilingual education in favor of so-called “sheltered English immersion” as the officially prescribed method of instruction for students with limited English proficiency.
Arizona’s voters had decisively rejected bilingual education in a 2000 ballot measure. Along with similar measures passed in California in 1998 and Massachusetts in 2002, Arizona’s Proposition 203 embodied a popular backlash against bilingual education that had grown since the 1980s. Critics of bilingual teaching viewed it as a politically correct relic of the 1960s and ‘70s that had proven academically ineffective and politically divisive.
The debate between English-only instruction and bilingual education has been fierce for decades. “People get very hot under the collar,” says Christine Rossell, a professor of political science at Boston University and critic of bilingual education.
Those who support a bilingual approach, says Arizona Superintendent of Instruction Thomas Horne, “aren’t interested in teaching the kids English,” but want to maintain “a separatist nationalism that they can take advantage of.” Horne, a Republican, intervened with the state’s GOP legislative leaders to try to undo the federal court injunction.
“When I tell people that the best way to learn English is to be taught in Spanish, they think I’m joking,” says Rossell.
Supporters insist that bilingual education is the best way to ensure long-term educational achievement for English-language learners. “We have gone backwards on educating non-English speakers,” says José Ruiz-Escalante, a professor of bilingual education at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg and president of the National Association for Bilingual Education. English-only proponents, he says, are “in such a hurry for students to speak English that we’re not paying attention to their cognitive development.”
“The important thing that students need to learn is how to think,” Ruiz-Escalante continues. “It doesn’t matter whether you learn to think in Spanish or in English. Kids will learn to speak English, but they will be limited” in their academic learning.
Out of nearly 50 million pupils in U.S. public elementary and secondary schools, about 5.1 million – more than one-tenth – are classified as having limited English proficiency. The number is growing because of increased immigration, both legal and illegal. The vast majority of English-language learners – nearly 80 percent – speak Spanish as their first language. But schools are also coping with rising numbers of students who speak a variety of other languages, almost all of which have far less similarity to English than Spanish has.
“It’s a growing challenge,” says Patte Barth, director of the Center for Public Education at the National School Boards Association (NSBA). “We have many more children coming into our schools for whom their first language is not English. At the same time, the need to educate every child to a high level is much more important than it was even 20 years ago.”
The imperative for results stems in part from enactment early in 2002 of the No Child Left Behind Act, the centerpiece of President George W. Bush’s educational-accountability initiative. The act mandated annual testing of students in grades 3-8 and required that schools demonstrate “adequate yearly progress,” including closing the achievement gap for English-language learners, at the risk of financial penalties for noncompliance.
The act also withdrew the federal preference for bilingual education over English-only instruction. Even so, Latino advocacy groups that have long complained of inadequate attention to Spanish-speaking students applaud the law’s emphasis on accountability. The act “changed the debate from what kind of education and curriculum to one of how do you best educate these kids,” says Raul Gonzalez, director of legislative affairs for NCLR, formerly the National Council of La Raza. “That’s where we think the debate should be.”
The federal government has no official count on the number of English learners in each instructional method, but the most recent survey by researchers indicates that the majority – about 60 percent – are in all-English curricula. Of that number, 12 percent receive no special services at all to aid English proficiency. The remaining English learners – about 40 percent – receive some form of bilingual instruction using their native language and English. The length of time in the bilingual programs varies from as little as one year to several. And, as Stanford University education professor Claude Goldenberg notes, there is no way to know the amount of support the students receive or the quality of the instruction.
In Arizona, state policy calls for English-language learners to receive four hours a day of intensive English instruction apart from their mainstream, English-only classes. Since the so-called “pullout” policy was implemented in 2008, the rate of reclassifying students from English-language learners to English-proficient has increased, Horne says. “Students need to learn English quickly to compete,” he says.
Tim Hogan, executive director of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest and the lead attorney in the Flores case, says it is “too early to tell” whether the four-hour pullout approach will be more effective than past policies that he describes as ineffective. But Hogan alleges that the policy segregates Spanish speakers from other students and risks delaying graduation by taking class time away from academic subjects.
Hogan stresses, however, that the lawsuit is aimed at ensuring adequate funding for English-language instruction, not at imposing a specific educational method. “We proved that the state funding [for English-language instruction] was totally arbitrary,” he says.
Horne counters that the Supreme Court decision leaves funding decisions up to the state. “The district court judges are being told not to micromanage the finances of the state education system,” he says.
Voluminous, statistics-heavy studies are cited by opposing advocacy groups as evidence to support their respective positions on the bilingual versus English-only debate. But Barth says language politics, not research, often determines school districts’ choice of instructional method. “A lot of it is political,” she says. “A lot of decisions about language instruction aren’t really informed by the research about what works for children.”
Whatever approach is used, many researchers say English-language learners’ needs are not being met. In their new book, Educating English Learners for a Transformed World, former George Mason University professors Virginia Collier and Wayne Thomas – who strongly advocate bilingual education – cite statistics showing a big achievement gap at the high-school level between native English speakers and students who entered school as English learners. Native English speakers have average scores on standardized tests around the 50th percentile, Collier and Thomas say, while English learners average around the 10th to 12th percentile.
Despite decades of attention and debate on the issue, “not much has happened,” says Kenji Hakuta, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Education in Palo Alto, Calif. “The problems of English-language learners persist whether it’s English-only or bilingual education.”
The Issues
* Is bilingual education effective for English-language learners?
* Is “English immersion” effective for English learners?
* Should funding for English-language learning be increased?
For more information see the CQ Global Researcher report on "Bilingual Education vs. English Immersion" [subscription required] or purchase the CQ Researcher PDF.
The Value of a College Education
Below is an excerpt from the Overview section of this week's CQ Researcher report entitled "The Value of a College Education: Is a four-year degree the only path to a secure future?" by Thomas J. Billitteri, November 20, 2009
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Mike Rowe, host of the cable-TV show “Dirty Jobs,” has a thing or two to say about work and education.
For 30 years, writes Rowe, whose show profiles some of the more challenging sides of blue-collar work, “we've convinced ourselves that ‘good jobs’ are the result of a four-year degree. That's bunk. Not all knowledge comes from college.” [Footnote 1]
Rowe's plainspoken view contradicts the lofty advice routinely dispensed to young people, that a bachelor's degree is a fundamental requirement for achieving the American Dream.
But with college costs soaring, skilled jobs such as welders and medical technicians in demand and millions of young adults ill-prepared for the rigors of a university education, some policy experts argue that while post-high-school education is vital in today's global economy, a four-year degree may be unnecessary for economic security — and perhaps even ill-advised.
“In many cases, young people think they are going to make substantial income just by having a college degree,” says Edwin L. Herr, a professor emeritus of education at Pennsylvania State University and co-author of Other Ways to Win, a book that analyzes alternatives to the traditional bachelor's degree. “There are a lot of people destined for unhappiness if we simply say that everybody ought to go to college. I don't think society in general requires everybody to go to college. It certainly requires people who have skills, and there certainly are ways to obtain those skills other than a four-year college.”
The Obama administration seems to agree. Under his American Graduation Initiative, announced in July, President Barack Obama is calling for an additional 5 million community college graduates by 2020, including those who earn associate degrees or certificates or who go on to graduate from four-year institutions. Beyond that, he wants every American to commit to at least a year of higher education or career training, whether at a community college or a four-year school, or through a vocational program or apprenticeship. [Footnote 2]
The United States had the highest percentages of college graduates in the world for most of the post-World War II era, but now the rates remain stagnant, according to the Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation for Education. About 39 percent of U.S. adults hold a two- or four-year degree, but in some countries, including Japan and South Korea, more than half of young adults ages 25 to 34 hold degrees, a foundation report said. “Even more disturbing for the U.S.,” it added, “rates in these other countries continue to climb while ours remain stagnant.”
Lumina estimated that at current college-graduation rates, “there will be a shortage of 16 million college-educated adults in the American workforce by 2025.” [Footnote 3]
Obama proposes to spend a record $12 billion over the next decade to strengthen the nation's system of 1,200 community colleges, part of a larger goal to restore the United States as the leader in college graduates by 2020.
“[F]or a long time there have been politicians who have spoken of training as a silver bullet and college as a cure-all,” Obama said. “It's not, and we know that.” But, he added, “We know that in the coming years, jobs requiring at least an associate degree are projected to grow twice as fast as jobs requiring no college experience. We will not fill those jobs — or even keep those jobs here in America — without the training offered by community colleges.” [Footnote 4]
To be sure, a bachelor's degree is a laudable goal for many young adults, one that can pay big dividends in personal satisfaction, career opportunities and earnings. In 2007 people with a bachelor's degree earned an average $57,181, or 63 percent more than those with some college or an associate's degree and 83 percent more than those with only a high-school diploma. [Footnote 5] And the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 4.9 percent in September for adults 25 and older with a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with 8.5 percent for those with less college and 10.8 percent for those with only a high-school education. [Footnote 6]
Types of Community Colleges, Enrollment and Demographics
Still, a four-year degree is not always the best option, workforce and public-policy experts argue.
For one thing, many students simply aren't cut out for college. “No one wants to really talk about this, but a lot of [teens] come out of high school unprepared to do legitimate college-level work,” says Kenneth C. Gray, a Pennsylvania State emeritus professor of education and coauthor with Herr of Other Ways to Win.
At the same time, four years of college demands a steep investment that may take years to recoup. In-state tuition, fees and room and board at a public four-year college now average $15,213 per year, up 5.9 percent in a year, though student aid often lowers the tab. At private schools, the bill — not counting any aid — runs $35,636 per year, up 4.3 percent in a year. [Footnote 7]
And a bachelor's degree is no guarantee of career success or upward mobility. Much may depend on the field of study. For instance, degrees in health care, computer science or engineering may offer far better prospects than those in the humanities.
Meanwhile, many good jobs simply don't require a bachelor's degree. About half of all employment is in so-called middle-skill occupations — jobs that require more than a high-school diploma but less than a four-year degree, according to a 2007 study by Robert Lerman, an economics professor at American University, and Harry J. Holzer, a professor at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute. Demand for such workers will likely remain strong compared to the supply, they said. [Footnote 8]
“Real pay for radiological technicians increased 23 percent between 1997 and 2005, speech/respiratory therapists saw real increases of 10 to 14 percent and real pay for electricians rose by 18 percent,” they found. “These increases compare very favorably with the overall 5 percent increase for the average American worker.” [Footnote 9]
In June, in the depths of the current economic downturn, The New York Times noted that “employers are begging for qualified applicants for certain occupations, even in hard times.” [Footnote 10] Most of the jobs take years of experience, the newspaper noted. But some jobs in high demand, such as those in welding, don't require four years of college.
“Not everyone needs a degree, and not every job requires a four-year degree,” says Tony Zeiss, president of Central Piedmont Community College, a six-campus institution in and around Charlotte, N.C., with more than 70,000 part- and full-time students. “For decades, only about 22 percent of jobs have required a baccalaureate degree or higher, and yet 75 percent of the jobs consistently require training beyond high school but below a baccalaureate. That's community college.”
Still, whether community colleges, which get most of their money from recession-battered state and local governments, can keep up with demand remains an open question, especially as the Obama administration puts them at the center of his postsecondary education policy. [Footnote 11]
Nearly 40 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in college last year, a record number that was propelled by swelling community college attendance, according to Pew Research Center data reported by The New York Times. [Footnote 12]
“At the same time that we have tremendous increases in enrollment, states are cutting budgets like crazy,” says Norma G. Kent, vice president for communications at the American Association of Community Colleges. “Our tradition has been to do more with less, but there gets to be a stretching point beyond which you cannot go. Our credo is open access and open doors, and whether consciously or de facto, we are turning away students.”In California, community colleges lost $840 million in state funding in the combined fiscal 2008–2009 and 2009–2010 budgets, according to Scott Lay, president and CEO of the Community College League of California. Institutions face eliminating course offerings and turning away students, he says. “We believe when this all shakes out, total enrollment will drop by about 250,000 students,” or 8.6 percent, by the 2010–2011 academic year, Lay says.
High-school vocational education programs have long offered the potential for non-college-bound students to learn the fundamentals of a marketable trade or craft, and then move directly into the job market or on to further training at a community college, technical school or even a four-year institution. Yet for decades “vo-ed” programs — typically wood shop or auto repair — carried a stigma, often unfairly, as a dumping ground for low achievers. In recent years, however, many vocational education programs have been transformed into progressive “career and technical education” (CTE) programs that integrate core academic training in math, reading and other essentials into job-specific courses like computer programming, medical technology, restaurant and hotel management and construction.
“Historically, there's been a real divide between the academic and vocational side,” says Julian Alssid, executive director of the Workforce Strategy Center in New York, a national nonprofit group that focuses on making education and workforce development more responsive to the economy. But, he adds, “we're seeing much more melding” of academic and technical training in career and technical programs.
The Issues:
* Is a four-year college degree necessary for financial security?
* Are high-school career and technical-education programs adequately preparing students for upward mobility?
* Can community colleges meet rising demand for their programs?
Footnotes:
[1] Mike Rowe, “Work Is Not the Enemy.”
[2] “Remarks of President Barack Obama, Address to Joint Session of Congress,” The White House, Feb. 24, 2009.
[3] “A Stronger Nation through Higher Education,” Lumina Foundation for Education, February 2009. The Lumina Foundation said its data source is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “Education at a Glance 2008.”
[4] “Remarks of President Barack Obama,” op. cit. For background, see Scott W. Wright, “Community Colleges,” CQ Researcher, April 21, 2000, pp. 329–352.
[5] U.S. Census Bureau.
[6] Bureau of Labor Statistics, Oct. 2, 2009.
[7] “Trends in College Pricing 2009,” College Board.
[8] Harry J. Holzer and Robert Lerman, “America's Forgotten Middle-Skill Jobs,” Workforce Alliance, November 2007. Holzer and Lerman are both scholars at the Urban Institute.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Louis Uchitelle, “Despite Recession, High Demand for Skilled Labor,” The New York Times, June 24, 2009.
[11] For background on jobs and the economy, see the following CQ Researcher reports: Alan Greenblatt, “State Budget Crisis,” Sept. 11, 2009, pp. 741–764; Peter Katel, “Vanishing Jobs,” March 13, 2009, pp. 225–248; Marcia Clemmitt, “Public-Works Projects,” Feb. 20, 2009, pp. 153–176; Kenneth Jost, et al., “The Obama Presidency,” Jan. 30, 2009, pp. 73–104; Peter Katel, “Straining the Safety Net,” July 31, 2009, pp. 645–668.
[12] Tamar Lewin, “College Enrollment Set Record in 2008,” The New York Times, Oct. 30, 2009.
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For more information see the CQ Researcher report on "The Value of a College Education" [subscription required] or purchase the CQ Researcher PDF
Financial Literacy
Should financial-literacy courses be mandatory in schools?
By Thomas J. Billitteri, September 4, 2009
Poor understanding of basic personal-finance and economic issues has left millions of students and adults mired in credit-card debt, prey to unscrupulous mortgage brokers and prone to making risky bets with their retirement money.
High-school seniors correctly answer only about half the questions on personal-finance surveys, and those who take personal-finance courses tend to score no better than those who don't. Studies show similar deficits among adults. Yet experts disagree on a solution. Only a handful of states require at least a semester course on personal finance, and some advocates want Congress or state legislatures to mandate financial education for all K-12 students. Others question the effectiveness of financial-literacy programs in schools, and some worry that corporations may have too much influence on curriculum and instruction. A better approach to improving financial literacy, some argue, is to tighten government regulation to make credit cards, mortgages and other products easier to understand.
The Issues
* Is financial-literacy education effective?
* Should financial-literacy courses be mandatory in elementary and high schools?
* Should college students receiving government loans have to pass a financial-literacy exam or course?
To view the entire report, login to CQ Researcher Online [subscription required], or purchase the CQ Researcher PDF
Overview from the report on Student Rights
By Kenneth Jost, June 5, 2009
Savana Redding recalls it as “the most humiliating experience” of her life: the day she was forced to undress to her underwear at her school in Safford, Ariz., in what proved to be a fruitless strip-search for a prescription-strength pain reliever.
The student's accusation led first to eighth-grader Marissa Glines, who was found to have several ibuprofen tablets in her wallet. Glines said she had gotten the pills from her classmate Redding. But when Wilson brought Redding to his office, she denied any knowledge of the pills.
A search of her backpack found nothing, but Wilson remained suspicious. He asked his administrative assistant Helen Romero to take Redding to the office of the school nurse, Peggy Schwallier, to look — as the school district's lawyers later put it — “for any pills that might be discreetly hidden in her clothes.”
A supporter of the group Students for a Sensible Drug Policy demonstrates at the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2007 during arguments in the case of Alaska high-school student Joseph Frederick, who was suspended for displaying his “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner during a school-sponsored event off school grounds. In a 5-4 decision, the court upheld schools' power to punish students for advocating or promoting illegal drug use.Redding, then 13, was directed first to remove her shoes and socks and then her shirt and pants. With nothing found, she was then told to shake the band on her bra and then the elastic on her underwear. Still nothing.
Redding was never touched, but, as she recalled later, she felt “violated” by the strip-search. Romero allowed her to get dressed and return to class, but the experience was so humiliating that Savana decided to transfer to another school. She says now she developed stomach ulcers as a result.
Nearly six years after the episode, Redding, now 19, sat before the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court on April 21 listening as they considered whether the strip-search violated her right under the Fourth Amendment to be free from “unreasonable” searches.
In years past, Redding's grievance would have gone no further than the local school board — if she or her family had complained at all. But for the past 40 years, ever since a landmark Supreme Court decision, student-rights have been a staple on the dockets of state and federal courts up to and including the nation's highest tribunal.
The student-rights era began with a 1969 decision, Tinker v. Des Moines, that upheld the right of three middle- and high-school students to wear black armbands to signal their support for a Christmastime cease-fire in the Vietnam War. “It can hardly be argued,” Justice Abe Fortas wrote, “that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”In the years since, “few realms of educational policy have escaped the courtroom,” according to Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank in Washington. The Supreme Court has established due process standards for student discipline and some limits on searches of students and their belongings. Today, lower courts are grappling with issues ranging from the free-speech rights of gay — and anti-gay — students and censorship of high-school newspapers to schools' efforts to police students' outside-school postings on the Internet.
Four decades after Tinker, civil liberties advocates say the decision is one to celebrate. “The Tinker decision was a watershed moment,” says Jamin Raskin, a professor at American University's Washington College of Law and editor of a book on student rights. “The Supreme Court essentially declared that education is about becoming a full-fledged citizen of democracy.”
“It seems a strange way to train children to be members of society to tell them that they have fewer rights than others,” says Catherine Crump, a staff attorney in the First Amendment Working Group at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “That doesn't seem like a good way to turn kids into adults who are fully participating members of our democratic society.”
Hess, who organized an AEI conference on education-related litigation in October 2008, agrees that recognition of student rights has had some benefits. “It's expected that adolescents will be more expressive,” he says. “Bringing some of that into the school environment seems both inevitable and constructive.”
On balance, however, Hess says the net impact of student rights has been “a substantial negative.” The movement, he says, “has significantly curtailed the ability of educational leaders and classroom teachers to set expectations, enforce discipline or aggressively shape a school culture that is conducive to teaching and learning.”
Richard Arum, a professor of sociology at New York University, agrees. “The expansion of students' legal entitlements has not only had unintended consequences on the capacity of schools to socialize youth effectively,” Arum writes, “but it has also increased the potential for student dissent in U.S. schools — whether of a political, religious or other ideological character.”
Without overruling Tinker, the Supreme Court has seemed more and more sympathetic to school administrators' concerns since the 1980s. In a pair of rulings under Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the court approved random drug testing for many high school students. And under current Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the court in 2007 ruled that public schools can punish students for advocating or promoting illegal drug use.
Representing Redding before the Supreme Court, Adam Wolf, of the ACLU's Drug Law Reform Project, acknowledges public concern about drug use by students. “We all want our schools to be safe and to be drug-free, but that does not give schools carte blanche to do anything they want,” Wolf says. “Some policies just clearly cross the line and unreasonably invade student privacy.”
But Matthew Wright, the Phoenix lawyer representing the school district, urged the justices to give schools flexibility in dealing with students suspected of using or distributing drugs. Schools are “in the untenable position of either facing the threat of lawsuits for their attempts to enforce a drug-free policy or for their laxity in failing to interdict potentially harmful drugs,” Wright said in a statement prior to argument.
The Issues:
*Do schools' anti-drug enforcement policies violate students' rights?
*Do schools improperly limit students' free-speech rights?
*Do schools improperly limit students' religious freedoms?
To view the entire report, login to CQ Researcher Online [subscription required], or purchase the CQ Researcher PDF.
Student Rights
Have courts gone too far or not far enough?
By Kenneth Jost, June 5, 2009
The Supreme Court introduced a new era in public education in the United States in 1969 by declaring that students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. Four decades later, state and federal court dockets are dotted with suits by students or parents challenging disciplinary decisions and school policies and practices. The Supreme Court, which has upheld random drug testing of students, is currently considering whether an Arizona school district violated a teenaged girl’s rights by strip-searching her because of what proved to be an unfounded accusation that she was carrying a prescription-strength pain reliever.
Student-speech cases often pose difficult issues as administrators, principals and teachers seek to reconcile students’ free-speech rights with the need to prevent disruption, maintain discipline and protect rights of teachers and other students. In recent years, judges appear to be giving more deference to schools — a trend applauded by many educators but criticized by student-rights advocates.
The Issues:
*Do schools improperly limit students' free-speech rights?
*Do schools improperly limit students' religious freedoms?
To read an excerpt of the report click here.
