Free Republic

... When results from the 2010 tests, which state officials said presented a more accurate portrayal of students’ abilities, were released last month, they came as a blow to the legacy of the mayor and the chancellor, as passing rates dropped by more than 25 percentage points on most tests. But the most painful part might well have been the evaporation of one of their signature accomplishments: the closing of the racial achievement gap. Among the students in the city’s third through eighth grades, 40 percent of black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students met state standards in math,...

... [T]he New York City Department of Education acknowledges that despite rising graduation rates, many graduates lack basic skills, and it is trying to do something about it. This year, for the first time, it has sent detailed reports to all of its high schools, telling them just how many of their students who arrived at the city’s public colleges needed remedial courses, as well as how many stayed enrolled after their first semester. The reports go beyond the basic measure of a school’s success — the percentage of students who earn a diploma — to let educators know whether...

President Obama on Monday will renew his call for the United States to lead the world in college graduation rates by 2020, an ambitious goal that senior administration officials say will require 60 percent of all young Americans to possess a college degree, up from 40 percent today. The United States gave up its spot as the world leader in college graduation rates about 10 years ago, as students in countries like South Korea, Canada and Russia began to surpass their American counterparts. Now the United States ranks 12th among 36 developed nations; a report by the College Board last...

The recent finding that economic success in life is largely determined by what you learned in kindergarten has proven contentious (at least among our readers). So what if I told you that economic success was instead determined by what your ancestors did more than a millennium ago? That is one implication of a provocative new study by Diego Comin, William Easterly (known for his skepticism of foreign aid programs) and Erick Gong. The study gathered crude information on the state of technological development in various parts of the world in 1000 B.C.; around the birth of Jesus; and in A.D....

More than 10 years have passed since she gave up her pursuit of a degree in computer science, but Yajahira Deaza still has regrets. She says she feels incomplete. She now works in customer service for a major New York bank, and her experience reflects the findings of an Associated Press-Univision poll that examined the attitudes of Latino adults toward higher education. Despite strong belief in the value of a college diploma, Hispanics more often than not fall short of that goal. The findings have broad implications not only for educators and parents, but for the economy. In the next...

People in developing countries have lower IQs because their bodies divert energy from brainpower to fighting disease, researchers claimed today. In hot nations blighted by deadly infections, the priority is survival and populations have evolved to develop stronger immune systems rather than intelligence, according to the controversial theory. Some critics warned the study could become an excuse for racism if it was used to suggest that people in the Third World are not as intelligent as those in cooler, richer climes. Others pointed out that the ancient Persians, Greeks and Romans lived in hot climates and still boasted extraordinary civilisations....

Global differences in intelligence is a sensitive topic, long fraught with controversy and still tinged by the disgraceful taint of pseudosciences such as craniometry that strove to prove the white “race” as the most clever of them all. But recent data, perplexingly, has indeed shown cognitive ability to be higher in some countries than in others. What’s more, IQ scores have risen as nations develop—a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect.” Many causes have been proposed for both the intelligence gap and the Flynn effect, including education, income, and even nonagricultural labor. Now, a new study from researchers at the...

Speaking to the NAACP convention in Kansas City on Monday (July 12), Michelle Obama said that because of "stubborn inequalities" that "still persist --- in education and health, in income and wealth --- "the NAACP's founders "would urge us to increase our intensity." The White House, for some reason, appears to have heard her call, for on Tuesday, reported the Chronicle of Higher Education, "White House Official Says Civil-Rights Office Will Enforce Fair State Spending for Black Colleges." John S. Wilson Jr., executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, said on Tuesday that the...

The incoming head of the National Governors Association said Sunday he will make increasing the number of students who complete college his focus during his scheduled yearlong tenure. West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, assumed the chairmanship of the NGA on Sunday from Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas, a Republican. Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican, replaced Manchin as vice chairman. Manchin said he will work to unite governors, higher education officials, campus leaders and corporate chief executives behind the college initiative he calls "Complete to Compete." "If we don't improve college completion rates in this country, our children will...

Coalition to Overcome Racism After the coverage we received in the Sentinel article of Wednesday, June 30, 2010, titled "Coalition earns grant to study institutionalized racism," we'd like to offer the following additional information about the Santa Cruz County Community Coalition to Overcome Racism. As the steering committee of SCCCCOR, we are excited about helping bring to Santa Cruz County a new approach to addressing institutional racism, and we are seeking to use all avenues at our disposal -- including this op-ed article -- to generate interest, support and participation in our activities. The premise behind SCCCCOR's work is that...

At City College of San Francisco, one of the country’s largest public universities, thousands of struggling students pour into remedial English and math classes — and then the vast majority disappear, never to receive a college degree. When Steve Ngo, a 33-year-old college trustee, learned that many minority students, among others, faced two-and-a-half years, or five semesters, of remedial English classes and a year and a half of math at the two-year college, he was shocked into action. His campaign for a one-year sequence of remedial courses ignited a campus furor, with students and a few trustees on one side...

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The city will search for a new admissions test for its gifted and talented public school programs, a Department of Education official said on Monday, in part to address concerns that some families were “gaming” the test through extensive preparation. The official, Marc Sternberg, the new deputy chancellor for portfolio planning, said the change could occur for the 2012-13 year. The city has one more year in its current testing contract. Mr. Sternberg announced the move at a City Council hearing on education, after extensive questioning from council members about why the city’s gifted programs were not as racially and...

"Comprehensive immigration reform" is a euphemism for amnesty. As such, reform will impose significant costs on the country. The primary effect of immigration amnesties in both the U.S. and Europe has been to attract more illegal immigration. An amnesty signals to potential border-crossers that if they can just get into the country illegally, they will eventually be given legal status. Illegal entries in the U.S. rose after the Immigration Reform & Control Act of 1986 went into effect and have increased fivefold from the 1980s to today. The vast majority of illegal aliens who have entered the U.S. since 1986...

Immigrants are making Germany 'dumber', according to a board member of the country's central bank. Thilo Sarrazin claimed the 'limited education' of immigrants - coupled with their high birth rate - meant Germans 'are becoming dumber in a simple way'. He said: 'There's a difference in the reproduction of population groups with varying intelligence.' It is not the first time the 65-year-old member of the Bundesbank has caused controversy since he joined last year. In October he described Muslim children as 'underclass' citizens. 'I don't have to accept someone who lives off a state they reject, doesn't properly take care...

In 1970, nine percent of California's population was comprised of immigrants; by 2008 it was 27 percent. A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) finds that as a result of immigration, California now has the least-educated labor force of any state. Historically, California was not a state with a disproportionately large unskilled population, like Appalachia or parts of the South. However, immigration has transformed the state. Absent a change in immigration policy, other parts of the country may be transformed in a similar fashion. The report, "A State Transformed: Immigration and the New California," can be found...

The staff of Normandy Crossing Elementary School outside Houston eagerly awaited the results of state achievement tests this spring. For the principal and assistant principal, high scores could buoy their careers at a time when success is increasingly measured by such tests. For fifth-grade math and science teachers, the rewards were more tangible: a bonus of $2,850. But when the results came back, some seemed too good to be true. Indeed, after an investigation by the Galena Park Independent School District, the principal, assistant principal and three teachers resigned May 24 in a scandal over test tampering. The district said...

Front-page headline in my New York Post this morning: 2 + 2 = 5 NY passes students who get wrong answers on tests The accompanying story describes a further dumbing-down of state math tests for kids in grades 3 to 8. Half marks are given for fragments of work; also for wrong answers arrived at via correct methods: “A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48 inches long gets half-credit for adding 24 and 24 instead of the correct 12 plus 12 . . . ” For us New York parents the only surprise here is that any...

The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry’s Law. The official title of this legislation is “Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering,” but nothing did more to empower its advocates than the controversy over a speech by Lawrence H. Summers when he was president of Harvard. This proposed law, if passed by the Senate, would require the White House science adviser to oversee regular “workshops to enhance gender equity.” At the workshops, to be attended by researchers who receive federal money and by the heads of science and engineering departments...

The Pew Hispanic Center released a sobering report this week reminding us about the bleak education outlook for the nation's largest minority group. The most worrisome stat? More than half of all foreign-born Latino adults in the U.S. are high school drop-outs. That's compared with 25 percent of native-born Hispanics. The implications of this trend are huge for a host of socio-economic reasons. But one of the most significant? It could lead to a more illiterate and ill-equipped workforce that's precisely what an information and technologically driven economy doesn't need.