Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Derek Bok on Fixing College Failure

March 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Derek Bok

A longtime critic of higher education, Derek Bok is the author of six books on the ivory tower, most recently Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More, published in 2005. Bok has an insider's view: He was president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991 and acting president from 2006 to 2007, the only person to serve twice in the job. During his first stint, Bok established what is now the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning to help boost the quality of instruction at Harvard. Today, at 80, he is a research professor at the ... Read More

More like this: Culture & Society, Education, March-April 2011, Views Reviews and Interviews
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Science Leaches Out of Science Class

February 1, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama urged Americans to “win the future” through a new dedication to the science and technology education that could help the United States “out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” He conjured an America where today’s fifth-graders could become the globe’s go-to experts in solar engineering, high-speed rail design and supercomputer construction. But in a sign of the distance between that universe and the one Americans really live in, it turns out many public school students aren’t even properly ... Read More

More like this: Education, Science, The Idea Lobby
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College Reversal?

January 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Some research has found that once Asian-American kids hit college, they no longer outstrip white students academically — if they’re living away from home. For example, a study of 452 students at UC Irvine led by University of Denver psychologist Julia Dmitrieva found that while both white and Asian-American students’ freshman year grades dipped below their 12th-grade GPAs, Asian-Americans’ fell dramatically, while white Americans’ dropped only slightly. “There’s a reversal of ethnic differences in college grades, at least temporarily,” Dmitrieva says. That reversal ... Read More

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Affirmative Action Bans: Who Gets Hurt

January 17, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

If the experience of California and Texas is any guide, this is what a state might expect if it bans the use of racial preferences in college admissions: Everyone who wants to go to college, including blacks and Latinos, will get into college – somewhere. But many more blacks and Latinos will be turned away from the best universities and left to “cascade down” to less selective four-year schools or two-year community colleges. Elite universities will become more white and Asian. In November, Arizona became the seventh state in the country to ban affirmative action in public higher ... Read More

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Charter Schools: What Would Dr. King Say?

January 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

It is unfortunate that the charter school industry now finds itself on the wrong side of educational progress and civil rights history, even as spokesmen like Nelson Smith, writing at Miller-McCune.com last month, engage in a public relations campaign aimed to minimize awareness of the segregated conditions that exist in the majority of American charter schools today. Whether located in the poorest, brownest neighborhoods of the Twin Cities or in the leafiest, whitest suburbs of North Carolina, charter schools often engage in a form of intensely segregated schooling that either contains or ... Read More

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Charter Schools and Equal Opportunity

December 16, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Remember Norman Rockwell's stark painting of the little African-American girl being escorted into a New Orleans schoolhouse by two deputy U.S. marshals? Today that little girl, Ruby Bridges, is working to open a public charter school in that same school building, which will house a civil rights museum as well. Wouldn't it be strange for a civil rights figure like Bridges to join a movement that was "accelerating re-segregation by race," as charter schools were characterized in a recent Miller-McCune.com article? Yet that's what some critics would have us believe, though more than a million ... Read More

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Are Charter Schools a Choice for Segregation?

November 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

When the charter school movement began 20 years ago, it was pitched to the public as a more flexible and autonomous alternative to traditional public schools. People believed, too, that charters would be less segregated because they could enroll students across district boundaries. Today, charter schools are getting a big boost in federal funding from the administration of President Barack Obama. This year alone, the number of charters has grown by 9 percent, to more than 5,450 schools. The popularity of the movement and the desperation of parents who enter their children in lotteries for ... Read More

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Teacher Training Too Academic, Not Practical

November 26, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Much of the furor over how to fix local education systems has focused on teacher evaluation. How do we hold teachers accountable and reward them for student achievement? Should they be paid according to how well their students perform on standardized tests? And is it fair game to publish any metric that evaluates them that way — teacher names and all — in, say, the Los Angeles Times? The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education is floating another idea, one that looks not at how teachers are evaluated in the classroom, but the way they're taught before they get there. ... Read More

More like this: Culture & Society, Education, The Idea Lobby
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The Politics of Bilingual Education

November 2, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

I can't help thinking that Angilee Shah picked the data that would support her bias on bilingual education rather than approaching the issue with an open mind ("A New School of Thought," July-August 2010). During a year in Paris, my brother and I attended 10th and seventh grades, respectively, at the international section of the Lycee de Sevres. For English speakers, the bilingual teaching lasted all of three months. For the many non-English-speaking students from around the world, the teaching was effectively immersion, although we all benefited from simple but very effective audiovisual ... Read More

More like this: Culture & Society, Education, November-December 2010, We Get Letters
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Delaying School Start Times Causes Alarm

October 25, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

If, as the science says, teens are more alert and healthier when they sleep later, why haven't more high schools adjusted their start times? The answer to that question lies in a mix of logistics and politics. "It was, as it's been in every other town, polarizing," recalls Lisa Bogan, a former school board member in Wilton, Conn., which changed its start times in 2003. She is now the school start time change specialist (yes, there is such a position) for the League of Women Voters of Connecticut. The state league embraces efforts to change school start times because it sees them as a way to ... Read More

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