Brian Reiser Is Smarter Than You

Nearly 1.5 million kids sat down last year, palms sweating, number 2 pencils in hand, to complete analogies and determine when a train leaving Cleveland at 45 miles per hour would pass a horse galloping toward Chicago at 15 miles per hour. Most of those 1.5 million will do just fine, get at least some schooling beyond high school, and become productive members of society. But only a handful—238 according to test prep giant Kaplan—got a perfect score on their SAT. Lakeside junior Brian Reiser was one of the few. “I’m definitely going to go to college, so in that respect, getting a good score on the SAT is quite useful," Reiser says. “It was also kind of, like, a personal goal.”�

Lakeside, which weathered a big storm last year, caters to the academic elite. Alumni include Bill Gates and Paul Allen as well as a who's who of Seattle families that share names with buildings—Nordstrom, McCaw. Elite higher ed isn't just a goal, it's an expectation and the students there shell out a pretty penny to attend—annual tuition tops $22,000. But Reiser says he doesn't know exactly what he wants out of the college experience. The school assigns college councilors to students in the spring of their junior year so "it’s really the discovery phase at this point,”� he says. The French-speaking Reiser adds that his interests veer toward math and finance.

In addition to his top-notch high school, Reiser ponied up for tutoring from Kaplan. Private programs such as this start at $2,399, says tutoring director Kate Newby. But unlike many kids who are there at the behest of motivated parents, Reiser was clearly the impetus behind his enrollment in the program, she says, adding that “he’s a pretty impressive kid; he’s very articulate.”� Kaplan guarantees a score higher than the assessment students take before beginning prep with the company, but they certainly don't guarantee any perfect scores, she adds. During the 2007 test cycle, Reiser and one other Kaplan enrollee in Massachusetts were the only perfect scores.

While his future may be only beginning to unfold, one thing is certain: a lot of trees will give their lives for the mountain of material bound for Reiser's mail box as every institute of higher learning with a recruiting budget tries to woo him to their hallowed halls.

Just for the fun of it, here's a practice question from SAT the College Board, which administers the test.

A special lottery is to be held to select the student who will live in the only deluxe room in a dormitory. There are 100 seniors, 150 juniors, and 200 sophomores who applied. Each senior's name is placed in the lottery 3 times; each junior's name, 2 times; and each sophomore's name, 1 time. What is the probability that a senior's name will be chosen?
(A) 1/8
(B) 2/9
(C) 2/7
(D) 3/8
(E) 1/2

Answer after the jump:

Continue reading "Brian Reiser Is Smarter Than You"

Topics: Education

Permalink | Comments (0)

Why The WASL Sucks

The WASL has been much on my mind recently, and not just because the state Legislature yesterday moved to make the test shorter and less expensive. My 3rd grade daughter started taking practice WASL tests to prepare for the real deal in April, and she has brought home sample questions from previous years to work on as homework. She hates them. And so do I.

I didn’t start out being opposed to the WASL. I liked the idea of a test that would force teachers to pay attention to historically neglected low-achieving students. That may be happening, although I’m not sure achievement has risen as a result. What I know for sure is that the test isn’t helping my child’s education.

The test samples she has brought home are deadly boring. They consist of short reading selections written in the driest way possible, after which follow a series of questions meant to test comprehension but are really tortuous exercises in finding micro-points that nobody but a test examiner would be interested in. They do not encourage debate, or thinking, or deep analysis or, perhaps most importantly, an interest in reading. Of course, my daughter — who reads rapaciously, whose comprehension is such that she can recite every Greek myth ever written, who loves to learn quite independently from school — can barely bring herself to do these exercises. And the worst part of it all is that the entire K-12 curriculum is now one giant WASL preparation.

Topics: Education

Permalink | Comments (3)

Bruce Lee Tribute, Again

The Los Angeles Times has a story today on efforts to get a Bruce Lee tribute at the University of Washington. Last month, Halley Griffin reported on the UW class created to come up with ideas for such a monument.

Topics: Education

Permalink | Comments (0)

Power President: Eaton at SPU

www.spu.edu

SPU President Phil Eaton is in the news with frustrated faculty voicing concerns over his handling of information in their most recent accreditation report. (The PI carried it on the front today, but the SPU student paper, The Falcon, led with the story yesterday. (As an alum and former Falcon writer and editor, it was heart-warming to see their scoop.) Eaton's handling of their legendary soccer coach Cliff McCrath's forced retirement only added fuel to the fire.

By way of context it's worth noting that this kind of tension isn't new territory for Eaton. In the fall of 2002, he announced that the school was considering a change to a semester system and created a faculty task force to explore issues related to making the change. It was pretty quickly apparent that the committee was looking at the issue of implementation, not whether they should actually make such a change and faculty reacted. By the end of the year, faculty held a vote on the subject. It came down a resounding no vote on semesters and maybe a bit of a no confidence vote in Eaton on the subject. Switching to semesters was taken off the table.

Before that, it was the hiring and subsequent removal of poet Scott Cairns in the English Department. In 1997, Cairns, a devout Christian, was offered a spot at SPU. But it turned out he had written a poem on the interaction of a poet and his muse that contained the line "sopping vulva." Eaton found out about the poem and yanked the job offer, much to the chagrin of faculty. Cairns is now at the University of Missouri and has published extensively, winning a Guggenheim Fellowship last year. In a not so subtle move, Cairns' poetry now appears on occasion in Image, SPU's arts journal. The whole incident was made all the more ironic by the fact that Eaton himself had once been a long-haired hippie poet, freaking out the more uptight students at Whitworth in Spokane in the seventies (my mom has the yearbook to prove it.) The saga was detailed in a May 1997 issue of the Seattle Weekly (scroll down for a short synopsis).

Tension between faculty and administration is pretty much the standard at institutions of higher learning, but it's starting to look like Eaton may be over staying a welcome that was never very warm to begin with.

Topics: Education

Permalink | Comments (0)

Dziko Goes to Federal Way

Trish Dziko

It’s official. Former Microsoftie Trish Dziko will start her first high-tech academy in Federal Way”�not Seattle. Dziko, who runs the non-profit Technology Access Foundation (TAF) in South Seattle, will sign a joint operating agreement with the Federal Way School District on Wednesday. Her school-within-a-school is due to open next fall at Totem Middle School.

Dziko had first proposed launching a TAF Academy at Seattle’s Rainier Beach High School but faced overwhelming opposition from staffers and community members worried that existing students would be short-changed. Then it seemed like the African American Academy was going to play willing host but the district never gave Dziko a firm green light. Dziko told me recently that she was as puzzled as anyone why it didn’t work out. While she said she may come back to Seattle eventually to start another TAF Academy somewhere, her focus is now on Federal Way.

Topics: Education

Permalink | Comments (0)

The New Male Majority

The current school board.

Looking at the faces of the all-but-certain new Seattle School Board members this morning, one thing struck me: Three out of the four are male. Peter Maier, Harium Martin-Morris and Steve Sundquist will join member Michael DeBell to give the seven-member board a male majority for the first time in recent memory. DeBell currently is the lone man on the board, reflecting a male-to-female ratio that has been pretty consistent over the last decade. Unfortunately, when something’s a female ghetto, it usually reflects its low prestige. The public seems to be coming to the conclusion that it can’t afford a low-prestige board any more, not with schools closing, constant budget cuts, new enrollment lines being drawn and the ongoing achievement gap. The business community obviously made that decision, given all the money it poured into the race. If that’s the case, that’s a good thing (school board directors should probably be paid more than a token amount of money too), no matter how much testosterone is or isn’t on the board.

Topics: Education

Permalink | Comments (0)

Lessons from Cleveland High

There's probably a book that could be written about what went wrong with the Gates-funded effort to transform Cleveland High School into four small "academies." When I was at the school last week researching a story about the Southeast Education Initiative, teachers complained that the effort never had sufficient resources given the expense of creating four mini-schools. Marie Groark, spokesperson for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, counters that funding has been ongoing at the school (where only two weak academies remain) but talks instead about "lessons learned" in the small schools effort.

Contrary to numerous reports (like this recent one in The Seattle Times), Groark insists "we have not backed away from small schools. In the last year, we have given more than $115 million around the country to create small schools." But she says the foundation is no longer giving grants directly to individual schools, as it did with Cleveland, due to a recognition that school transformations are hard to pull off without district and state buy-in. Now the foundation is funding either districts, as it did with New York City, or big organizations, like Green Dot Public Schools, which with Gates help is creating a number of charter schools in Los Angeles.

Would either more funding or district support for small schools have helped the Cleveland effort? One of the interesting things I heard from some teachers there is that they feel they have been doomed by the district's choice system. They say that balance in the student population—and just numbers of students, period— were lost when the neighborhood's high achievers started choosing other schools with better reputations.

Yet, this is precisely what was supposed to happen under the tenure of the charismatic former Superintendent John Stanford, who supported the kind of "market-driven" reforms that could be found in places with charter schools. If schools, by virtue of their performance, couldn't attract students, so be it; they were supposed to wither and die. The current movement by some district folks to scale back choice represents a repudiation of that legacy. At the same time, it's true that we got a half-baked version of that concept. Schools were left to wither indefinitely without being closed, giving us the worst of both worlds. Where the new superintendent, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, stands on choice remains to be seen, but as the Southeast Education Initiative shows, she does seem willing to close—or at least dramatically "reconstitute"—low-enrollment schools.

Topics: Education

Permalink | Comments (5)

This Just In: College Students Don't Know Everything About Everything

Wait! Before you send your child off proudly to the University of Washington this fall, there’s something you should know. Only half of University of Washington seniors could correctly answer obscure questions about American history and economics when asked by a survey that they had no impetus for doing well on. Central Washington University Professor Matthew Manweller blames “left-leaning academics spend[ing] so much time teaching a self-loathing of American culture and institutions that their students know less about their country than when they came in as freshmen.” Well that is certainly one opinion, another being just another example of poor use of polling data.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute surveyed 14,000 freshman and seniors at 25 randomly selected colleges and universities and 25 of what it deems “elite” American institutions, on questions from specific points of American history and the wording of the Declaration of Independence. This conservatively bent group considers a failure only based on the difference in scores between the two classes.

The study deems UC Berkeley, MIT, Yale and Johns Hopkins among the top “failure” schools because of their seniors scoring less on the survey than their freshman, a trend they call “negative learning.” The study fails to recognize, however, that these “elite” schools all have overall the top averages in scores of anywhere from 60-70% correct. Whereas the lesser known schools that ISI praises for increasing student knowledge by 6-10 percentage points, may have added those points to a school that only scored 24% correct in the first place. Instead of focusing on the “lack” of education learned in college on knowledge they consider “basic civic literacy,” why not look to the place where you are supposed to learn “the basics”?

Continue reading "This Just In: College Students Don't Know Everything About Everything"

Topics: Education

Permalink | Comments (1)

Where to Put Your Booty

An addendum to last week's freaking story. Over the weekend, a Lynnwood High School teacher told me that her school had come up with some creative catchphrases to help the students remember what's hot and what's naughty. In addition to "face to face and leave some space," there was also, "use your fanny like you would for your granny." And then there's my all-time favorite: "no booty in the wang-wang."

Topics: Education

Permalink | Comments (1)

The New, New Math

Is there no end to "new math?" Apparently not. I heard the term when I was a kid—what it meant I was never quite sure but whatever it was supposedly confused the heck out of old-school parents. Now, Seattle Public Schools is on the verge of adopting a new math program for elementary schools. This comes only seven years after the district implemented its last math program that was supposed to be cutting edge and conceptual, in line with the belief that students need to learn not only formulas but different methods for figuring those formulas out for themselves. At a briefing today for reporters at the John Stanford Center, district math program manager Rosalind Wise said that students under the current program might spend the day measuring each others' arm span and height. Eventually, they might plot the results on a graph, try to come up with a formula for the relationship and learn about the concept of slope. Such a drawn-out method proved controversial and difficult for some teachers, parents and students to grasp, said Chief Academic Officer Carla Santoro, who convened the briefing in order to explain the new math curriculum that district staff will present to the school board tomorrow night.

Hence, the new, new math—really a blend of two curricula, one called Everyday Math, the other Singapore Math — which by her description presents a better balance of conceptual thinking and directive information based on formulas and facts. Which sounds good (although the district is bracing for controversy given warring factions on how math should be taught), but pity the poor teachers who will have only two days of training this summer to get ready for implementing the program in the fall. Santoro conceded that isn't much time, but says many schools will get onsite instructional coaches to help teachers throughout the year.

Topics: Education

Permalink | Comments (0)