Race Goals Are Easier, Not Better

Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune, 24 Apr 2009

Here's a quick history quiz for you. Which nationally prominent leader said this:

"Edicts of nondiscrimination are not enough. Justice demands that every citizen consciously adopts a personal commitment to affirmative action, which will make equal opportunity a reality."

Was it the Rev. Jesse Jackson? The Rev. Al Sharpton? Sister Souljah?

No, it was Gov. Ronald Reagan of California in his 1971 executive order. He sounded more liberal, at least on this issue, than the racial-quota fighter who became president nine years later.

Times have changed, but on race not all that much, as far as Julian Bond is concerned. The civil-rights-era hero, now chairman of the NAACP, whipped out that old quote like an ace up his sleeve during a debate at the Library of Congress this month to argue that what was good for Reagan two generations ago is good enough for America now.

I'm not as certain of that as he is. Sitting in the audience at the debate, I was struck by how much America's persistent problems with race have changed, while so many of our leading affirmative action proponents have not.

Yet I was also struck by how replacing race-based affirmative action with the class-based kind is easier to say than to do, especially at elite colleges and universities.

That's one reason why Bond opposed the evening's proposition: "Should affirmative action be based on wealth and class rather than race and ethnicity?"

President Barack Obama thinks it should, he has said in writing and out loud. "We have to think about affirmative action," he said in at last summer's convention of black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American journalists in Chicago, "and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren't getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more." It is safe to say that, in the fashion of President Richard Nixon opening doors to China, Obama's position later helped him with white voters and didn't hurt him very much with blacks.

Defending Obama's position in the debate was Dalton Conley, a sociology professor at New York University and an expert on wage and wealth gaps. Past discrimination in jobs and lending has left such a wide wealth gap between the races, he argued, that diversity-minded colleges would end up with a healthier mix by race, ethnicity and class if they focused on household wealth as Obama suggests, instead of race.

Bond's teammate Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, disagreed. Bollinger was president of the University of Michigan during the 2003 Supreme Court cases that upheld and clarified affirmative action at that school. Then and now, he said, "we want both racial diversity and ethnic diversity" plus "diversity based upon income and class." And the most effective way to do that, he said, is to take race into account, as well as class.

Otherwise, "and this has been studied by many people," he said, "if you use only income, you will increase the proportion of white students and decrease the proportion of African-American and Hispanic students."

You can see or read the hourlong debate at the Web site of its sponsor, the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, http://millercenter.org/.

Yet that's also why the debate's other participant, John McWhorter, a best-selling author and Manhattan Institute senior fellow, was right to point out a more important hidden danger: When diversity policies lower achievement bars, they can hurt as much as they help.

When he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, he recalled, it was only after the affirmative action ban "that efforts were actually made to teach black and Latino students throughout the state to actually qualify for what the admission procedures were." It hadn't happened before that, McWhorter said, and it wasn't going to happen as long as state universities could rely on racial "preferences," a word that proponents hate despite its accuracy.
With that, he exposed an eternal truth: If we did the tough job of providing quality educational opportunity to every American kid from preschool on, we would not need special programs to build diverse students bodies. They'd be diverse already.

Even so, I do agree with Bond and Bollinger that too much is made of the argument that affirmative action admissions leave a stigma on black and Hispanic students. People get into selective colleges for all sorts of reasons – including legacy preferences, athletic scholarships and geographic diversity – without feeling stigmatized. In the end, it's not how you got into college that counts; it's how you leave.

Leaders and Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Effectiveness

"We decided on the following goal: to grade all 50 states and Washington, DC, on their K-12 school systems in order to identify both leaders and laggards in the tough business of school performance. "



An interesting report with interactive graphic from the US Chamber of Commerce on how state educational efforts stack up in the following areas:

• Academic Achievement


• Return on Investment


• Truth in Advertising About Student Proficiency


• Rigor of Standards


• Post-Secondary and Workforce Readiness


• 21st Century Teaching force


• Flexibility in Management and Policy


• Data quality
  
  http://www.uschamber.com/icw/reportcard/default

Lessons at a Video Game Convention

Patricia G. Greene and Heidi M. Neck

16 Apr 2009

Grand Theft Auto. America’s Army. Spore. The Sims. Chain Factor. Halo. Guitar Hero. City of Heroes. Left for Dead. Fable. World of Warcraft. Everquest. Warhammer. These are titles of video games our students are playing when not attending or studying for our classes! On average college students are spending 50-100 hours mastering each of these games. This may make you question: How much time are they spending on my class?

We are entrepreneurship professors at a very entrepreneurial institution, Babson College. Recently we became interested (some of our colleagues would say obsessed) with video games, not simulations, and how they can be used in higher education. Over a whimsical e-mail exchange in late 2008 we asked each other, “If we could create a video game where students could ‘experience’ entrepreneurship, what would it look like? What would it feel like? What and how would they learn?”

Be careful what questions you pose in life because our view of the world has been dramatically altered after embarking on an “expedition” to answer the question. We can’t give away the answer just yet but we can share part of our journey. In fact, we’re eager to share our exploration of this space to see how those of us in higher education might best embrace the reality of virtual worlds.

We must confess; we are not gamers. For the most part we are still stuck in the days of Pac-Man, Asteroids, and Centipede, but we openly admit that our cool factor is increasing because we have been caught playing Wii Tennis and Guitar Hero! But there’s something invigorating about learning something entirely new and we don’t think we realized exactly how much we didn’t know until we played a little hooky and took a field trip to the industry Mecca - GDC. For the uninitiated, this is the annual Game Developers Conference. The week-long conference started with two days of “Summits” devoted to different areas of gaming such as artificial intelligence, mobile gaming, casual games, and virtual worlds. We attended the serious game summit that “spotlights the rapidly growing serious games industry that features the use of interactive games technology within non-entertainment sectors. The summit provides a forum for game developers and industry professionals to examine the future course of serious games development in areas such as education, government, health, military, science, corporate training, first responders, and social change.”

We learned about the human-interest sides of the gaming industry, such as a sign of experience, and therefore status, is not only wearing jeans and T-shirts but also wearing GDC shirts from previous conferences. As business school professors, well let’s just say, we didn’t bring any T-shirts, or at least any we would wear in public. As any good conformist would do, however, we bought GDC shirts on the first day and trust us when we say the crowds in the GDC store were on par with those in an Apple store during the holiday season. Never have we been at a conference where “while supplies last” really means something.

Gaming is serious business both economically and socially. Consumers spend $25 billion a year on video games and game components and there are an estimated 800 million gamers worldwide. But the social upside of gaming is either misunderstood, or at the least, not yet well or broadly understood. Games such as Grand Theft Auto and Postal have inappropriately defined the industry as one that promotes aggressive and violent behavior.

But for the sake of argument we must consider the corollary. If games can promote negative behavior can they not also promote positive behavior? The opening speaker of the Serious Games Summit, Austin Hill of Akoha, asked a compelling and poignant question, “What if playing a game could make the world a better place?” And we quickly learned that some games are making a world a better place. Games that aim to have a positive social impact are among the fastest growing of all serious games segments. These games are unleashing the imagination of our youth – an imagination that should be cultivated to navigate the complexity and uncertainty of the “real world.”

We learned that lines between the real world and virtual worlds are blurring. During a case study presentation on an emerging virtual world game for young children, the designers spoke about the challenge of very young gamers not seeing the distinction between the physical and virtual worlds. The purpose of the game was to have children design a virtual toy that they would then go buy in physical form. The language of the game encouraged children to make their toy “real.” The children did not understand the terms “make it real” because the virtual toy in their mind’s eye was already real. Whether virtual or real, it was all about play.

Gaming, serious and casual alike, can promote a culture of empathy. During one of the very first sessions the speaker presented a selection of quotes from young gamers. One young gamer said that gaming made him emotional. He felt hardened by reality but games allowed him to release emotions that would have otherwise remained dormant. Rather than desensitizing our youth, games are allowing students to explore what Will Wright, creator of the Sims franchise and Spore, called the “possibility space.” Every game has a beginning and end but today’s advanced games allows each player to create a unique path while seeing, experiencing, and perhaps even feeling the consequence of their decisions.

The necessity of collaboration was ubiquitous. Even the GDC bookstore inspired us to think about education and gaming in a different way. The number of books on display that crossed disciplines, modes of learning, future levels of intelligence, and task oriented programming was quite striking. We saw books on creativity, managing leadership, developing a team, and getting your product in market. Ironically this is what we see at our business school conferences. The world is getting smaller.

Taking center stage in the store were books on art, mythology, writing and storytelling, sociology, and anthropology. The world is getting more integrated. While many of the speakers throughout the Serious Games Summit talked about the importance of teams with each team member having an important skill set, they also talked about the need to have team members understand the perspective of others. It wasn’t enough to be the pure programmer or be the pure content expert. You needed to have an understanding of what the other was going to do to have a truly excellent product. We started thinking further about our academic tradition of silos and what this really means for the future of higher education. The world, virtual and real, does not exist in silos.

Overall, the future of cyberspace is analogous to the future of business – new worlds, new actors, new ways of navigating, new outcomes, new pathways, and broader, more integrated, ways of thinking. What will our avatar look like? And will it be buying a new corporate jet with federal government stimulus money?

In general, our classrooms are filled with discussions related to the economy and global business challenges. It’s not only a good time to review our business models but to rethink the actual role of business in society and how we teach. We teach business from traditional models developed, for the most part, many, many decades ago. Is this really the best we can do? Are games possibly teaching the things we don’t, won’t or can’t?

At the beginning of the Serious Games Summit we had decided to use a video game design approach to help us try and think in a more “gaming way” about what we were learning and its application to entrepreneurship within higher education. To do so, we bought a box of cards called The Art of Game Design: A Deck of Lenses, by Jesse Schell. The box (with accompanying book) claims to be “The Ultimate Creativity Toolkit for Game Design.” Our approach was simple. Randomly pick a card from the deck at the beginning of every session, write it down, and see if it speaks us in some way at the moment or later. The cards we chose, 15 in total, created an uncanny story of our experience at the GDC. We offer a glimpse of three of the cards chosen over the course of two days.

The first card chosen from our brand new deck of game design cards was The Lens of Secret Purpose and it asked, “Why am I doing this?” Yes, we laughed but our purpose was simple. We are curious; we are insatiable learners; and we passionately believe that we need to find better ways of teaching and learning.

Another card was The Lens of Endogenous Value that asked us to consider the “relationship between value in the game and the player’s motivations.” We extended this to think about the motivation of our current generation of students and the connection or disconnection to our pedagogy. Higher education must be more than workforce development, even in times of economic crisis. Perhaps especially in times of economic crisis.

Yet another card chosen was called The Lens of the Crystal Ball, which happened to be the last card we chose of the conference. The card stated, “If you would know the future of a particular game technology, ask yourself these questions. What will ____ be like two years from now? What will ____ be like four years from now? What will ____ be like ten years from now? Why?” Think about it. Higher education is a game. We have a start, finish, and many possibility spaces – the pathways our students choose to navigate their college experience. The difference between video games and higher education as a game is the pace of change. A game introduced today will look considerably different in four years. Can we say the same about curriculum?

The world of game design is about play, experiencing and creating empathy, collaboration, and future thinking. It emphasizes purpose and value, and recognizes the constant need to adapt and embrace new technology. Imagine the world today if we replaced the words “game design” in the first sentence of this paragraph with the words “higher education.” We definitely think the time has come to embrace the reality of virtual worlds!

Dreamers and Doers

John Schwartz

NYT, 4 Jan 2009

Nicolas Naranjo knocked on Evan Kimbrell’s door at midnight.

At other colleges, this might have been a prelude to a fraternity prank or an invitation to help float the keg at the end of a party. But Mr. Naranjo, who had just arrived in the United States from his native Colombia some weeks before, wanted to talk about starting a business. He had an idea about a hop-on, hop-off bus service for college tours around the Boston area. Mr. Kimbrell had tried to start a bus company the previous year and knew the pitfalls — and was happy for the break from his studies to talk business.

This is life in the E-Tower at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. Babson focuses on business, and E-Tower focuses, even more tightly, on entrepreneurship. The residents of E-Tower hash out new business plans at Monday night meetings, and they talk shop throughout the day and night.

“We’re really a dorm of dreamers and doers,” says Prinya Kovitchindachai, who is hoping to market a vile-tasting pill, imported from Thailand, that he touts as a hangover treatment.

“College students are the largest group of binge drinkers,” he says, quietly gleeful at the prospect of such a large market so close at hand. Friends have helped him bone up on the basics of international shipping, of securing shelf space and — in a consultation with a neighbor who was wearing a towel and still dripping from the shower — of creating Web sites.

“Any school can teach entrepreneurship,” he says, “but at Babson, we live entrepreneurship.”

Now, let’s not get carried away: as a reporter and as a parent, I find myself on plenty of college campuses these days, and many of the students I meet are indistinguishable from the dull-eyed slackers I went to college with (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and Pluto was still a planet). But then there are those who have this . . . THING, this go-getting excitement to start something, make something. They want money, sure. But the overwhelming desire seems to be to carve out something of their own.

Today’s students have grown up hearing more about Bill Gates than F.D.R., and they live in a world where startling innovations are commonplace. The current crop of 18-year-olds, after all, were 8 when Google was ­founded by two students at Stanford; Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004 while he was at Harvard and they were entering high school. Having “grown up digital” (to borrow the title of Don Tapscott’s recent book on the Net Generation), they are impatient to get on with life.

“They’re great collaborators, with friends, online, at work,” Mr. Tapscott wrote. “They thrive on speed. They love to innovate.”

The easiest way to find kids like these is to check in on entrepreneurship education, in which colleges and universities try to prepare their students to recognize opportunities and seize them.
For those who haven’t been paying attention, the idea of entrepreneurshipmight bring up the Memo Minder, the lame invention by the “Future Enterpriser” played by Bronson Pinchot in “Risky Business.”

Reader, you date yourself: that was 1983. In the intervening decades, Tom Cruise has grown up and entrepreneurship programs have boomed.

A report issued last year by the Kauffman Foundation, which finances programs to promote innovation on campuses, noted that more than 5,000 entrepreneurship programs are offered on two- and four-year campuses — up from just 250 courses in 1985. Full-scale majors, minors or certificates in entrepreneurship have leaped from 104 in 1975 to more than 500 in 2006. Since 2003, the Kauffman Foundation has given nearly $50 million to 19 colleges and universities to build campus programs.

Lesa Mitchell, a Kauffman vice president, says that the foundation is extending the reach of its academic gospel, which used to be found almost exclusively in business schools.

Now, the concept of entrepreneurship is blossoming in engineering programs and medical schools, and even in the liberal arts. “Our interest is in the whole curriculum,” she says. “We need to spread out from the business school.”

Either as class projects or on their own, students in an array of disciplines are coming up with ideas, writing business plans and seeing them through to prototype and, often, marketplace. In their spare time, students in agricultural economics at Purdue invent new uses for soy; industrial design majors at Syracuse, in a special collaborative laboratory, create wearable technologies; a psychology major, through the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, starts a limited liability company offering neuromarketing services.

Richard Miller, the president of the Olin College of Engineering in Wellesley, recalls a time that academically packed programs like engineering believed that teaching business and entrepreneurship would require watering down curriculum. “We think differently now,” he says. Dr. Miller says a personal turning point came back in his days at the University of Southern California, when visitors from McDonnell Douglas told a classroom of engineers that the project they were working on in class was actually the subject of a patent worth $200 million. “What’s a patent?” they asked.

Clark University, a liberal arts college in Worcester, Mass., offers a minor in entrepreneurship that can be fitted into just about any degree plan. “It’s too important to be taught by business professionals to business students,” says George Gendron, the founder and director of its innovation and entrepreneurship program. The program, he says, is intended to help students find “what they’re passionate about,” and to learn how to apply themselves to it practically, whether in business or in the growing area of social entrepreneurship, which focuses on societal change.

Even at Babson, entrepreneurship isn’t all about business: in E-Tower, Austin Conti and Gerald Praysman are writing a screenplay about the Middle East that they hope to sell using the techniques for spotting business opportunities. And Gabriel Schillinger, a freshman, is engaged in social entrepreneurship. A nonprofit organization he helped start in high school, For Darfur Inc., put on a concert by Kanye West in Florida that raised $300,000 for Doctors Without Borders, and he is trying to build on that early success.

The entrepreneurship movement has its critics, especially among those who see college as a time for broad academic exploration. Daniel S. Greenberg, author of “Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards and Delusions of Campus Capitalism,” finds the increasingly fervent campus embrace faddish and narrow. “I just don’t think that entrepreneurship ranks so high in terms of national need, or in terms of what can effectively be taught in the limited time available” in the college years, he says. “What aren’t you studying because you’re studying entrepreneurship?”

Leonard A. Schlesinger, Babson’s president, says that the question of whether innovation really can be taught is “an age-old debate.” Mr. Schlesinger, who has served as chief operating officer of Limited Brands, says that if teaching entrepreneurship is an academic fad, it is one the school has pursued since 1978 — “a fad like wearing pants and underwear.”

Schools do not teach the spark of creativity so much as provide the tools for students to capitalize on that spark, he says.“I’m going to teach you to find opportunity.”

Especially in a bad economy, he adds, the curriculum “gets our people to be much better prepared for the structure and dynamics of the job market they’re likely to face. The thought process and logic that we teach is at the core of stimulating innovation, stimulating innovation is at the core of any developed economy.”

“I’m not trying to be arrogant,” Dr. Schlesinger notes, “but the world needs what we do.”
The urge is strong at E-Tower.

With word of a visitor on the premises spreading, some two dozen dorm residents crowded into the common room to talk about their projects. They were brimming with excitement about their plans, and eager to share them with a reporter who, as more than one noted, might be able to help them make a connection in the business world or get them a little publicity. Prinya Kovitchindachai pressed one of his hangover pills into my hand. I tried it, and grimaced at the taste. “It’s much better if you’re drunk!” he insisted.

Another student grabbed me as I was leaving. He asked that I not use his name in the article. The people with whom he was dealing in his start-up trading business, he said nervously, “don’t know how old I am.”

Wall of Rejection Letters Is Teens' Group Therapy

Peter Schworm, Boston Globe

With each maddeningly thin envelope, each remorseless rebuff from another top-choice college, Kellen Mandehr died a little death. In search of catharsis, the senior at Newton South High School posted the offending documents on the school's "Wall of Shame," a hallway bulletin board blanketed with dozens of college rejection letters.

With each punch of the stapler, each slam of his fist, Mandehr won a small measure of payback. And a large measure of liberation.

"It was definitely a good feeling," he said yesterday, reminiscing by the mural of rejection letters. "I pounded it pretty good."

High school seniors everywhere have traditionally posted their rejection letters as an act of collective defiance against the high-pressure and hypercompetitive college admissions process. But this year, with top-tier colleges rejecting more applicants than ever before, dejected students say they are especially in need of what amounts to a group hug.

At Newton South, rejection letters from most of the country's most selective colleges, from Amherst to Wesleyan, from Bowdoin to the University of Southern California, tell the grim tale. A demographic bulge in the number of high school students, combined with a sharp rise in the number of colleges they apply to, has created a numbers crunch.

Newton South students did their part, with about a third of the class of 425 students applying to at least 10 schools, with an average of about seven.

Nearly all Newton South seniors will wind up at a strong four-year school this fall. Still, the sting of rejection, particularly for high-achieving students whose sights have been trained on the Ivy League since grade school, is hard to shake.

"These are kids who are used to getting their way their whole lives," said Newton South college counselor Barbara Brown. "For many, this is their first major disappointment. That can be very difficult, especially in a community like this."

So in their moment of need, the reeling students rally together. By making a personal setback public, sharing the letters can be cathartic, students say. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, students find comfort in a communal, almost collegial, show of solidarity against an impersonal, seemingly arbitrary system.

"It's unifying, and kind of celebratory," said Max Lorn-Krause, who was denied at several schools and plans to study theater at Ithaca College. "It's a rite of passage."

Calling the postings the Wall of Shame is meant to be sarcastic, students say. In many ways, posting the rejection letters is a way to find acceptance.

"At first, it was painful. I basically had to lie down and not be out in the world for a while," said Alex Kaufman, who said he was denied at nearly the entire New England Small College Athletic Conference, which includes Amherst, Williams, and other top liberal-arts colleges. "There's nothing worse than getting a rejection letter, but knowing you're in the same boat as lots of other people, that definitely helps."

When Sofya Rozenblat, 18, got the bad news from Dartmouth College, her first choice, she was crushed. She shed some tears. Stapling her letter on the wall the next morning, she recalled, started the healing process, she said.

"It's very therapeutic," she said. "Letting everyone know made me feel so much better. I realized that almost everyone gets rejected, so it's one more thing we all have in common." Now, the setback seems distant as she looks forward to starting at the University of Michigan.

At Newton, the Wall of Shame serves as kind of a water cooler for college-related gossip and reflection. Some sigh and shake their heads, muttering.

Some walk by and glance, then turn their head away in disgust, then reflexively snap it back, like a car crash. Some juniors walk by and gulp.

A few pore over them, reading each stock phrase of gentle letdown - "very real regret" (Duke), "sincere regret [Yale], "so sorry to tell you" [MIT], "I am sorry to bring you disappointing news" [Wesleyan], "careful and concerned consideration" [Brown], and "we wish you every success with your further education" [Georgetown].

A few students have written editorial comments on the letters. "Don't worry, I got in other places!" wrote one student rejected by Bowdoin.

The wall started four years ago by a pair of friends who both applied early to Dartmouth, Brown said. One got in, one didn't, and a tradition was born.

Brown said the college admissions season is always filled with heartache. The race to get into elite colleges can be all consuming, and rejections can take on tragic proportions.

Daniel Rabinowicz, 17, had his heart set on Brandeis, but the affection was not returned.
He is heading to Clark or Northeastern with his head held high, however. "That rejection letter can be tough," he said. "But look at this, and you know you're not alone."

Currently Reading

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, Anthony Esolen

Deadly Scenarios, Andrew Krepinevich

Covering The New Yorker, Francoise Mouly

Economic crisis threatens small, rural schools

Terence Chea, AP, 13 Mar 2009

In this rustic corner of California wine country, parents are fighting to prevent the closure of a one-classroom school established before the Civil War.

Near Las Vegas, families are trying to rescue two elementary schools with dwindling enrollment. And in a rural area outside San Diego, a 60-year-old schoolhouse closed because it had just seven students.

Rural schools such as these are being threatened as the economy forces deep cuts to education. Districts nationwide are preparing to shut down many campuses, and small, isolated schools are vulnerable because they serve fewer students and cost more per pupil to operate than larger schools.

"All over this country, the pressure is on to close rural schools," said Marty Strange, policy director of the nonprofit Rural School and Community Trust in Arlington, Va. "They are a target in these hard economic times."

Among the schools targeted is Wooden Valley Elementary School, which has one teacher, one teaching assistant and 20 students from kindergarten to fifth grade. Surrounded by ranches and vineyards in the rolling hills of Napa Valley, it is one of the oldest one-room schools still operating in California.

An icon of American culture depicted in the television show "Little House on the Prairie," the one-room schoolhouse dominated education before buses allowed children to attend schools more than walking distance from their homes.

A century ago, there were more than 200,000 one-teacher schools in the country, but that number dwindled to 335 in 2006, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.
In rural San Diego County, enrollment at Palomar Mountain School was only seven students when it closed last year after six decades.

Outside Las Vegas, school officials recently postponed a vote to close Lundy Elementary and Goodsprings Elementary after parents protested. Both schools have fewer than 10 students, and Goodsprings is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In Northern California, Wooden Valley has staved off closure many times before, but parents worry that the state's budget crisis is so severe that it could finally shutter a school that has existed in some form since the 1850s.

District officials have proposed closing their two smallest schools to help offset $10 million in cuts to its $115 million annual budget. The 17,000-student district also is looking into increasing class sizes, shortening the school year and laying off nearly 10 percent of its 900 teachers.

"We're in difficult straits," Superintendent John Glaser said.

Parents are raising money and lobbying district officials to keep open the old school, where children of different ages learn and play side-by-side. A decision is expected later this month.
"By closing our school they are taking away our way of life," said Wanda Berger, the school's PTA president and mother of two students. "It's the way our founding fathers went to school, and education was pretty strong back then."

California schools, which rank near the bottom nationally in per pupil spending, are preparing to make drastic cuts after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature last month reached a budget deal that reduces K-12 education spending by $8.6 billion — more than 10 percent — through June 2010.

"These cuts are completely devastating," said Bob Wells, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators.

California school districts are set to increase class size, close libraries, eliminate sports programs, scrap electives such as art and music, and lay off tens of thousands of employees.

The districts are also preparing to close dozens, possibly hundreds, of schools with low or declining enrollment and send the displaced students to other campuses.

"We can't afford to keep open all the schools we got," said Scott Plotkin, who heads the California School Boards Association.

School officials say small schools like Wooden Valley are not cost-effective and that students can benefit from the resources of a larger school.

But advocates say that when rural schools close, children face longer commutes and parents become less involved. They also note that studies show that small schools lead to better grades and lower dropout rates.

"If we really cared about raising student achievement, we'd be creating more small schools, not less," Wells said.

The 20 students at Wooden Valley attend class in a schoolhouse built in the 1950s near the original wooden schoolhouse.

Teacher LeeAnn Ohlandt said it is a challenge teaching students at six different grade levels, but she encounters far fewer behavior problems than at her previous school.

"I love it," Ohlandt said. "I've become part of their families. I get to see these kids grow."

Although Wooden Valley does not have the resources of a larger school, parents say their children learn better social and communication skills and are not exposed to the teasing and bullying common in many schools.

Korinne Norlund, who has six children attending Wooden Valley, said she would home-school her kids if Wooden Valley closed.

"It's a very safe environment emotionally," she said. "There's no ridicule of any kind. It's just something you don't get in the average public school."

Colleges are the ones fearing rejection letters

G. Jeffrey MacDonald

USA Today, 1 Apr 2009

For college-bound students, it's time to make decisions — and to navigate a transformed landscape where acceptances and wait-list status might have different implications than they did just a year ago.

Decision letters being sent out this week reflect the worries of administrators, who fear admitted applicants may hesitate to commit in this climate of economic uncertainty. Private colleges especially are preparing for lower than normal matriculation rates by accepting more applicants, expanding wait lists and bolstering efforts to woo admitted students, says the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Four-year colleges "are attempting to hedge their bets as best they can, (in case) students simply downshift and opt for a less expensive option," says Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

To secure their futures, schools are courting applicants with a previously unseen intensity:

•Santa Clara University has enlisted its president, provost and 400 alumni volunteers to phone all admitted students and encourage them to enroll.

•The College of Saint Benedict in St. Joseph, Minn. (for women) and Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minn. (for men) doubled their joint transportation budget this year to $50,000 to fly in more than 160 admitted students from across the country for campus visits.

•Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Va., this year has doubled (from five last year to 10) the number of local receptions it's sponsoring around the state for admitted students.

•Every student admitted to California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, Calif., is expected to get a note from someone with a common interest or geographic background.

Not all schools are worried about enrollments next fall. California community colleges, for instance, fear the opposite: A glut of new students may mean some get turned away. Ivy League universities with generous financial aid programs expect strong turnouts. Flagship public universities, such as the University of Washington in Seattle and University of Texas in Austin, are more selective as they manage a surge of applications from value-seekers.

The right fit and right price.

But in a year marked by layoffs and lost college savings, administrators say, enrollment predictions at most schools aren't worth much. More than 90% of respondents to an online survey of 593 teens in February said they were revising college plans to favor less expensive schools. Even some public colleges are admitting more students in case large numbers opt not to enroll, says Tom Taylor, vice president for enrollment at Ball State University, which has not adjusted admission criteria.

Before this year, choosing a college "was more about finding the right academic fit, social fit and which community you liked best," says Katherine Cohen, CEO of ApplyWise.com, co-sponsor of the online survey. "Now, how you're going to pay for that fit is just as important."

Navigating this new environment requires updated strategies, experts say. When actively courted by a college, students may need extra effort to stay focused on evaluating which school is the best fit, says Jane Shropshire, a college admissions consultant in Lexington, Ky.

"It can really turn one's head to get a call from a department head or the president of an institution and make one think: 'Wow. This is really a remarkable level of attention,' " Shropshire says. But, she says, prospective students need to ask current students "whether this is the kind of school where this lavish attention will continue."

Another issue: whether to negotiate for a bigger financial aid package. Families increasingly believe they can bargain for a better deal, Nassirian says. But unless a student's situation has recently changed, such as if a parent got laid off, he says there's no point. "It's no more realistic than to go to CVS and negotiate the price of cough syrup," he says.

Others disagree. Both Cohen and Shropshire say their clients have often met with success when they've compared financial aid offers and asked a school to beef up its award. Becker College Dean of Admissions Karen Schedin says a family recently faxed its award offer from a similar school in a bid to get more money from Becker. She says Becker likely will respond with a better offer — maybe $1,000 or $2,000 higher.

"They are bargaining," Schedin says. "Hopefully, if we can adjust it a little, this family will say 'good enough' and come."

More persuasion, opportunity.

In some cases, students appreciate schools' efforts. Kurt Roscoe of Ridgefield, Conn., went in February to a new type of reception on Becker's campus, for admits interested in majoring in computer-game design. The event helped persuade him to enroll.

"Students majoring in game design were there, and they explained that students in game design are rather tight-knit and stick together," Roscoe says. "That made me feel a lot better, because usually ... you have to worry about bullying or getting looked down on because of your (game-design) major. I didn't really feel that I'd have that problem at Becker."

Students on wait lists, meanwhile, need to be aware they're part of a school's insurance policy, Shropshire says. Wagner College in New York City, for instance, has increased its list to 140 names, up from about 85 last year. But while the school may put more students in limbo, wait lists may also lead to more opportunities than in years past.

"My college counselors think this year I have a better chance of getting off the list because of what's going on with the economy and kids not being able to afford the tuition and other costs," says Meredith Bates, a high school senior in Bethesda, Md.